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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovack. Today, I'm joined by Steve Deckert, who handles strategic technology partnerships at Automatic. He's here to talk about the new Reddit for WooCommerce integration. It appears to be a significant step forward in integrating your WooCommerce shop with one of the most popular social platforms. Steve, welcome to the WP Minute.
Steve Deckert (00:25)
Thanks for having me, Eric. Excited to be here and talk about Reddit.
Eric Karkovack (00:29)
Yeah, so before we get into all that, I'd like to talk a little bit about your role with Automatica. Is WooCommerce your main focus or are you kind of ⁓ a master of all trades with their different products?
Steve Deckert (00:42)
Yeah, I, a jack of all trades, master of none. Some, some may say I work on the strategic partnerships team at WooCommerce. I've been here at Automatic for almost six years now and worked on various strategic technology partnerships. So think of the largest technologies that merchants interact with. Those could be advertising plugins such as Reddit and others. They could be shipping, taxes plugins, all sorts of the most important technologies that merchants use. The strategic partnerships
team works on those partnerships with those partners. And so I'm on that team and I've been working on various strategic partnerships over the years, more recently focusing on our advertising partners such as Reddit.
Eric Karkovack (01:26)
Okay, so we talk about the Reddit integration, but there's already been some integrations with Facebook and I believe Amazon and a few other places. How important is it in your view for WooCommerce to kind of integrate with these different platforms? And how much shopping do you think is actually done through social?
Steve Deckert (01:49)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, social media, ⁓ is so important for discovery and in some situations for purchasing as well from small to medium sized businesses. in a previous life, I was actually a merchant, ⁓ a long time ago. ⁓ I was selling, ⁓ refurbished toner cartridges for laser printers online way back in the day. And that business unfortunately was not a successful one. It's one that we had to shut down due to a lack of sales. And so.
I think just about any merchant that's out there, especially ones that are getting started or smaller ones that are trying to grow, they'll tell you just how important sales are. so advertising platforms like Reddit and others that are out there, they're key, particularly for new merchants that are getting started that may not have that community yet, that may not have customers yet and need to find them in a way. So yeah, these integrations are so important. Reddit is one of them. We also have from an advertising
We also have integrations with all of the major platforms meta Google tick-tock Pinterest and snapchat which is also recently launched and I think it's really important for us to have broad coverage there because Someone that's on reddit may not necessarily be on other unit may not be able to reach that that shopper on other channels in fact 40 % of a 30 to 40 % of reddit users
users
are not on these other platforms. 30 % of Reddit users aren't on Facebook. 40 % of them aren't on Instagram. 40 % of them aren't on TikTok. ⁓ 2 thirds of them aren't on LinkedIn. So depending on how you're trying to reach different groups of folks, Reddit may be the only way to reach some of these types of shoppers that these businesses desperately need in some situations.
Eric Karkovack (03:43)
It does seem like Reddit is kind of its own little world within a world kind of compared to some of these other platforms. ⁓ And the people that are on there seem very passionate for sure about, you know, checking in multiple times a day in kind of a kind of a different way than we do with Facebook or X or blue sky or those type of places. ⁓ How did how did this whole ball get rolling with with integrating to Reddit? You know, how did that come about for you guys?
Steve Deckert (04:13)
Yeah, so when we're, we are looking at ⁓ strategic partnerships like those of Reddit, often we see, we start with merchant demand and merchant needs. So there are, there's some form of merchants reaching out to us that are asking about it, or maybe they're using another extension to meet those needs. And at that point, ⁓ the Reddit would reach out to us or we would reach out to Reddit or sometimes both and talk about working more closely together. And that's, that's a partnership that we would form that includes
working together on product and making sure that if we are working together, we have the best integration available for our merchants. so the Reddit for WooCommerce integration is a first class integration. ⁓ It will be the best integration between WooCommerce and Reddit and the best way to advertise on Reddit.
Eric Karkovack (05:03)
Yeah, I was going to say, looking at this, this is more like a partnership, right? This isn't just somebody making an extension to go in and bring Reddit into your site or push your content out to Reddit. It's an actual partnership with like more of an official integration, right? So you probably are going to get the higher quality, more reliable product in the end.
Steve Deckert (05:26)
That's correct. Yep. You have the ⁓ strength of Reddit knowing their platforms and WooCommerce knowing ours, working together to make the best integration possible. So there are other third party tools out there that you can choose to use if you'd like. WooCommerce is open. You'll always have that choice. But we would recommend that you use the official partnership supported integrations because it's not just an extension we've built. It's an extension that we've built with Reddit.
and it will be the best way to advertise on Reddit.
Eric Karkovack (06:00)
Yeah, that's a big difference. I mean, for for the store owner that doesn't know a whole lot about Reddit, what what is the actual you know, what do you think is the biggest benefit for these folks? Like, why should they go into, you know, Reddit's ad program? How will that help them? Do you think in the long term?
Steve Deckert (06:23)
So I would say ⁓ if you're already a business that's advertising elsewhere,
You will be reaching new potential customers that you couldn't reach elsewhere. As I said before, 30 to 40 % of these users are not on other advertising channels. So you're reaching an entire pool of new potential customers. And we know that it's a big pool. There are over 433 million weekly users of Reddit. So more than the population of America is logging into Reddit every single week and checking out.
One of the many communities there's over 100,000 communities on Reddit that are specialized and dedicated towards a certain topic. And so there is a massive, a massive set of potential customers out there that are in these niche communities that are focused around products. And they're often discussing products and brands about 50 % of all online conversations that are related to purchasing decisions happen on Reddit.
And Reddit is the number one trusted source for product recommendations. You can see this even where people will, if they're investigating a product or a category of products, they'll actually search on Google and they'll search whatever product they're looking for and Reddit because they trust Reddit. And so it's a large group of passionate, trusted users. There's product discussions are happening on that channel too. And you may not necessarily be able to reach those users.
users with other ad channels too. So if you're looking to grow, ⁓ I think it's a great place to grow. we ⁓ have a special integration here with the Reddit team that also includes a $500 ad credit when you spend $500. So there's a matching ad credit that's available. ⁓ Get it now, get it while you can, and try it out. It's really easy to set up, and you can ⁓ see if you can expand your sales. I think you can.
Eric Karkovack (08:20)
Yeah.
And the extension is free, right? So I mean, there's no extra cost involved. It's really just what you're spending with Reddit, correct?
Steve Deckert (08:35)
Yeah, exactly.
You have these matching ad credits with Reddit, so you're basically getting 50 % off your ad credits when you sign up. Getting started is really, really easy, and you may find that you've found a new channel, a new group of customers, new group of sales that you can target with Reddit very effectively and really quickly.
Eric Karkovack (08:57)
One thing I did also want to point out is it seems like I don't know what Reddit is doing and how they're doing it, but they seem to have a lot of juice for SEO. Like when you're searching for something on Google, I know personally I'm getting Reddit results like near the top just about every time, no matter what subject it is.
That seems to be a pretty good selling point for this too. mean, even if you're, ⁓ let's say you're selling ⁓ handmade scarves, you might be able to go into a knitting group in Reddit or something and find it on top of the search results and boom, there's your ad.
Steve Deckert (09:35)
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just SEO and search results. It is a trusted platform for SEO certainly, but also increasingly for AI. So if you want your products to show up in AI and you would like it also to show, you want your products to be mentioned in SEO as well, Reddit is the place to be. It's increasingly being used to train models. That data is being used to train models. And if your brand's not being mentioned there, then you simply won't show up.
There are a ton of reasons to be on Reddit. I think it's a no-brainer, especially with how easy it is to get set up.
Eric Karkovack (10:13)
So what does the setup look like from a user's point of view? Are we just basically connecting our ad account from Reddit to the WooCommerce site after the extension's installed?
Steve Deckert (10:25)
Yep, so if you log into your WooCommerce store, can go to the WooCommerce Marketplace, the best place for you to get extensions. You can also go to WordPress.org if you prefer, and you can find the Reddit for WooCommerce plugin available there. After you install it, you're prompted to go through onboarding. Onboarding is five clicks and about three minutes. It's really quick. ⁓ You're essentially creating and connecting a Reddit account and a Reddit business account. ⁓ You will be prompted to
sync your catalog data to Reddit as well and install what's called a conversion API and a pixel. So you have ⁓ two ways of sending conversion data to Reddit ⁓ and we suggest that you set both of those up for redundancy. So if Apple chooses to block a pixel on someone's iPhone, for example, that conversion data is still getting sent server to server from your WooCommerce
server to Reddit's advertising platform using what's called the conversion API. So you have redundancy in data signals being sent and you'll be asked to set that up during onboarding as well. The final step will be actually creating your first Reddit campaign and you can create what's called a dynamic product ad, which is a really intelligent machine learning AI powered ⁓ advertising product, ⁓ very easy to get set up. You can just set a budget and
daily budget and a target, goal, and it will take your catalog data, it'll take that signal data that you've set up as well, and it will find the customers that are most likely to purchase from you. And for that, I also recommend... ⁓
Go a little bit bigger than you would initially think to start with an ad campaign because again, this is machine learning. This is AI. It needs to train itself on your products and which customers are the best fit. when you're test, it takes some time and it takes some data and it takes some money. So I strongly recommend if you're, if you're getting set up, you're setting up your first campaign, go a little bit larger than you initially would, ⁓ then your instinct would be because it will help the model train itself better.
Eric Karkovack (12:16)
Okay.
So it takes a little time.
Steve Deckert (12:42)
become more intelligent and you'll actually get a higher return on ad spend. It's the number one mistake that I see when people set up these kind of ad campaigns is they don't actually put enough into it and then the model can't find the right types of customers. It runs out of money. It runs out of data before it can optimize things.
Eric Karkovack (13:02)
That makes a lot of sense. You've got this promotion with the credits too, so you're pretty much doubling what you're initially putting in there for the time being. Hopefully, we'll give a little bit time for those ads to take effect and be placed in the right ⁓ spots for ⁓ conversions.
Steve Deckert (13:24)
Yeah,
there's effectively a 50 % off sale on ad credits right now. So yeah, I'd strongly recommend ⁓ folks get started. ⁓ They sign up, max out that ad credit, start their first campaign and make it a relatively larger one and get that data back. And then look at your return on ad spend and make a decision to go from there. But certainly test out the channel and see how much you can grow.
Eric Karkovack (13:50)
Yeah, it should be kind of a fascinating experiment, especially for folks that aren't too familiar with Reddit, I would think. What does the future look like for this? Are there any other ⁓ features, any other kind of ⁓ bells and whistles that Woo and Reddit are working on for the future?
Steve Deckert (14:08)
Yeah, I mean, this is really, just getting started. We just launched this, this integration recently. ⁓ Moving forwards, there's a ton that we can do together. I think that measurement and analytics are something that we'd like to do. But ⁓ I would actually turn the question back to all of the WooCommerce merchants that are out there. ⁓ Get started, get signed up, run some ads and tell us what you folks would like. You can submit ideas and feedback on the WooCommerce marketplace and we'd
truly listen to that feedback, especially when it comes to partner ⁓ extensions such as Reddit. So ⁓ get started, give it a shot, and let us know what we can do to make it better and what V2 should look like.
Eric Karkovack (14:53)
Yeah, user feedback really is the best way to make those decisions, right? mean, you're figuring out, you can decide, know, at Woo headquarters, well, we think this should happen, but the users have a different perspective, right? So that they're the ones that are kind of down in the trenches using the product. So that's a good idea to have, get people to ⁓ test it out see what they can ⁓ figure out as far as ⁓ future releases. ⁓
Is there any other, are there any other platforms we should be on the lookout for or even ⁓ updates to existing platforms?
Steve Deckert (15:31)
Yeah, I'm ⁓ really excited about ⁓ other ⁓ advertising partnerships. We just launched a Snapchat partnership within the last few months as well. ⁓ Similar to Reddit, are other, ⁓ there's a new group of customers there that you could potentially reach. So depending on your products and what you're offering and what demographic you're targeting, that may be another set of net new customers that you can reach. And I always love to point out our
partnerships with Google and TikTok as well. think the Google ad integration is world-class integration and they're a great advertising platform for a reason. if you're not already using the Google for Woo, the officially supported, again, on both sides, Google and Woo have made this their official product they're working on. I suggest you check that out as well as our TikTok and Snapchat integrations.
Eric Karkovack (16:27)
Yeah, that's a nice range you have there because you can reach just about every demographic whether it is the knitting forum on Reddit, ⁓ subreddit, ⁓ or you're trying to ⁓ catch the young folks on TikTok or Snapchat. That's a pretty nice range, pretty much whoever you want to target. It looks like WooCommerce right now has that integration that you need.
Steve Deckert (16:50)
Yeah, and we've definitely.
I know what it's like to be a merchant. I wish I had these options when I was a merchant. And ⁓ I know that it's busy and it's difficult, particularly for small to medium sized businesses. You want to sell things. You don't necessarily want to focus on technology. So a big focus for these ad integrations is making it easy to get started and to offload as much of the thinking as possible to machine learning and AI. So a lot of these ad platforms have these smart campaigns.
Eric Karkovack (16:56)
Yeah.
Steve Deckert (17:22)
recommend
that you check them out because you can harness the power of AI ⁓ to optimize, auto optimize your ad campaigns for you. So check them out, give them tests, they're tests. Test them out, see if they work. And if they do work and you see a great return on ad spend, something like 500 % return on the money you put into these campaigns, then put more into it and continue. And if they don't work out, it was a test and ⁓ you haven't spent too much money and you haven't spent too much time.
getting things set up because of how easy it is to get set up and because of those matching ad credits that a lot of these platforms have.
Eric Karkovack (18:00)
As an aside, ⁓ what about ⁓ store owners who are looking to target certain geographic areas? What if, like I'm in central Pennsylvania right here, what if I just wanted to target maybe folks in the northeastern United States? Is that something that you'd have read it and I know Facebook has that ability with their ads. Is that something that's also kind of baked in?
Steve Deckert (18:23)
Yeah, so you can do that ⁓ and you can also do it with other ad platforms too. Those are more of the manual ad creation types. So those are where I'd say very good if you are a more experienced advertiser or let's say you have an advertising ⁓ employee or marketing person that does that or an agency that does that.
Definitely those power users will have those kind of power tools for the average small to medium-sized business that you know is maybe a mom-and-pop shop or you know someone that ⁓ is a solopreneur ⁓ I would I would recommend taking advantage of the the artificial intelligence and machine learning powered ⁓ Campaigns they are they are really smart if they have if they have enough data ⁓ And again, that's that's budget then they can really really optimize things and you won't need to spend as much
time tinkering and they can find out what where your best customers are for you.
Eric Karkovack (19:21)
It's nice that you have the option though, at least, you know.
If you are the power user, can go ahead and manually set ads up the way that you want them. But you also have this really powerful tool that's going to do it for you as well. So I think that's an awesome choice to have. It used to be in the old days, you kind of got stuck with just manually trying to get your Google ads working, for example, and so much trial and error. So maybe this is an area where AI just ⁓ makes life a whole lot easier for small businesses.
Steve Deckert (19:52)
Yeah,
it's easy to get started. so that would be what my suggestion, get started, try it out. And if you're seeing an RR, a return on ad spend, with a certain channel or certain channels that you've tried out, then start to get more sophisticated if you'd like, or bring an agency in or continue down the path of, you know, set it and forget it, style advertising.
Eric Karkovack (20:13)
All right, well, Steve, think that's all I have for you today. I really appreciate your time and filling us in on this cool new integration. I look forward to seeing how that works out for the community and all these shop owners.
Steve Deckert (20:27)
Yeah, thanks for having me today, Eric. I appreciate it.
Eric Karkovack (20:30)
And how can folks reach you online or at least ⁓ provide feedback for the product?
Steve Deckert (20:37)
Yeah, so if you have any feedback at all about the Reddit for WooCommerce extension or any other officially supported WooCommerce extensions that are available on the WooCommerce marketplace, ⁓ you can go to that product listing on the product marketplace and there is actually a section where you can click on to submit that feedback. So we would love to see that there. We do look at it. We do use it to build roadmaps. So please submit that feedback there. Otherwise, folks can
find me on LinkedIn X the usual channels as Steve Deckert.
Eric Karkovack (21:12)
All right, awesome. Well, thank you, Steve. And thanks to every one of you for watching and listening. This has been another episode of the WP Minute. Be sure to visit us over on the WPminute.com slash subscribe. You can grab our newsletter, support the work that we do over here at the WP Minute. We'll continue to serve WordPress professionals. Thanks, and we'll see you next time.