Before you follow Reddit's optimisation score, ask your CRM

Reddit has announced three tools for planning and running campaigns: a campaign planner, a campaign optimisation score and campaign budget optimisation. Reddit says the planner helps advertisers make more informed decisions with projected reach, impressions, and costs, and that they can compare plan versions across budgets, audiences, objectives, and placements, then turn their selected plan into a draft campaign.

Reddit's announcement said the campaign planner and the campaign optimisation score were rolling out to all advertisers through October. It says campaign budget optimisation is now available on the Awareness and consideration, Traffic, Sales (beta), Lead generation (beta) and App promotion (beta) objectives.

This page is about the score and the budget setting, because each one changes where your money goes. Our reading on the planner: its projections are Reddit's forecast, worth checking against what the campaign then delivers.

Reddit describes the campaign optimisation score as personalised guidance during campaign creation and editing. The score combines a 0 to 100% rating with data-driven recommendations tailored to each campaign, which Reddit says help advertisers identify ways to improve performance.

The announcement does not say what the rating is calculated from, or how much each recommendation is worth, so we do not state either.

Meta's opportunity score is also a 0 to 100 score built around recommendations, and Meta is explicit about what it is not. Meta says the score, including a high score, does not itself reflect your actual or future performance, and that you should not turn off campaigns with a low opportunity score. Reddit's announcement does not say whether its own score reflects performance.

Reddit says advertisers with an optimisation score of 80% or higher saw 19.6% lower blended CPA than advertisers with lower scores. It says even a 5-point increase in the score was associated with a 4.4% lower blended CPA over the measurement period. Its footnotes put both figures on Reddit internal data from July to September 2026, and the announcement's disclaimer says results are not typical and may vary by campaign.

Our reading: both figures compare advertisers with each other, and Reddit's own word for the second is associated. The advertisers who take their score to 80% may differ from the rest in budget, experience or offer, and any of those could lower a CPA without the recommendations doing it. The announcement does not define blended CPA, and a figure from Reddit's internal data counts the acquisitions Reddit records, which is a step short of a customer in your CRM.

Reddit says campaign budget optimisation automates budget allocation across ad groups. Advertisers set budgets and bids at the campaign level, while automated optimisation shifts spend toward the best-performing ad groups, without the advertiser manually adjusting spend across ad groups. Its figure is that advertisers using CBO for traffic saw 10% lower CPCs, from a Reddit internal study in Q4 2025.

The announcement does not say how Reddit decides which ad groups are best-performing, so we do not state it.

Our reading: we would expect any system that moves money between ad groups to rank them on the results it can see, and on a Reddit campaign those are the conversions Reddit records. On a lead generation campaign that can favour the ad group that collects the most form fills, which is not always the one whose leads buy. And a cheaper click, which is what the traffic figure measures, is not a cheaper customer.

This is our practice, not Reddit's. Treat each recommendation as a change to test, not a box to tick. Apply one at a time, write down the date and the score before and after, and judge it on the leads your CRM marks as qualified in the weeks that follow, not on how far the score moved.

On campaign budget optimisation, the question is what your ad groups are for. If they are a test, such as two audiences you want to compare, letting Reddit move the budget between them ends the even split before your CRM can tell you which audience bought. We keep budgets per ad group while we test. Once the CRM shows which ad groups produce customers, campaign budget optimisation is a reasonable way to let Reddit do the allocating, checked against the CRM like everything else.

A small account has a further reason to wait, in our view. With one or two ad groups there is little for an allocator to choose between, and a few weeks of spend may not reach enough qualified leads to show whether it chose well.

Our checklist, set out as practice rather than drawn from a Reddit account we can quote. Before applying anything, record the score, the date and the recommendation. Tag every lead with its campaign and ad group so the CRM can split them. After the window you set in advance, divide each ad group's spend by the leads that reached the pipeline step you chose, and compare that ranking with where Reddit moved the money. If they agree, the score and the allocator are working for you. If they do not, you have learned what Reddit is optimising for, and it is not your sales.