Reddit's B2B Intent Ads Should Be Judged on Huntress's 40% Opportunity Rate
Reddit now runs lead-gen objectives through Max and is testing in-market audiences for AI and cybersecurity buyers. Its pitch leads with a nearly 7% CPA gain from internal August data.
October 7, 2026
Reddit added the lead-generation objective to its Max campaigns on October 6 and put B2B intent on the menu. In-market audiences, in beta and applied automatically through Max, aim at people researching purchases in categories that include Enterprise and Business AI and Cybersecurity. HubSpot is being tested in open beta as a platform partner for attribution, reporting and account setup, and a Pixel and Conversions API implementation is planned for later this year. Bombora, Demandbase, Clay and Octane11 supply audience data, with G2 arriving through the Bombora connector. Octane11 and Dreamdata (in alpha) handle measurement.
The pitch sizes the room at more than 20 million business decision-makers, a Bombora figure. It also says 9 in 10 used the platform to research business products in the past year, citing Reddit's own US survey of 600 decision-makers. The audience is real, but narrower than that framing suggests. Reddit's co-branded study with SurveyMonkey in March found that 23% of 1,202 US decision-makers had used Reddit for research, rising to 32% of software buyers. For an AI or security vendor, that's about a third of the market doing its homework where the vendor can't speak first.
Reddit proves cheaper leads, and its one pipeline number used older targeting
Reddit's headline claim for in-market audiences is a CPA improvement of nearly 7% against its other first-party targeting options, based on internal data from August. The footnote that explains the method ends mid-sentence on the published page, at "Automated targeting on." Max itself was sold on cost, too. When it opened to all advertisers on September 3, Reddit cited 17% lower CPA and more than 27% more conversions from 17 split tests run in mid-2025.
That's the same yardstick Reddit used two years ago. When lead-gen ads went to public beta in July 2024, the CRM link was a Zapier integration and the proof was LaunchDarkly's 30% lower cost per lead. Cost per lead suits an automated campaign because form submissions arrive fast and in volume, which is what the optimizer learns from. In B2B it's also the metric most easily satisfied by people who will never buy. A campaign tuned to cheap form fills finds the cheapest form-fillers.
The one number in the release that measures pipeline belongs to Huntress, the cybersecurity company. Across two campaigns Huntress cut its CPA by more than half, and 40% of the sales-qualified accounts Reddit sourced over the past year became sales opportunities. Huntress got there with community targeting across all placements, aimed at IT and security decision-makers. That's the subreddit-level targeting Reddit already sold. The in-market audiences launched on October 6 weren’t part of it, so the case study vouches for the channel more than for the new product.
Operators call Reddit demand gen, so the test has to read opportunities
Operators talking about Reddit ads mostly argue about whether it produces demos. In a September thread on whether Reddit is a B2B lead-gen platform, one advertiser said broad-interest ads "buy curious clicks and get 0 demos." Others said useful content plus tight community targeting outperformed the ad-to-demo flow. An r/b2bmarketing thread the week before the launch ran the same way. One marketer who had run Reddit for B2B SaaS called it demand generation more than lead generation, and another warned that Redditors hate ads. Neither thread had more than 14 upvotes, so treat both as anecdotes.
Judging on pipeline has a cost. An AI or security deal can take two quarters to close, so a pilot judged on closed revenue never gets a verdict. That’s why platforms and buyers settle for CPA. The Huntress figure answers that, because the share of sales-qualified accounts that convert to opportunities shows up inside a quarter, long before a deal closes. It's the same gap that makes ChatGPT Ads hard to judge for sales-led teams. A platform that reports clicks and form fills leaves pipeline for the buyer to measure.
What this means for B2B demand-gen teams
For a demand-gen team selling into AI or security, Huntress's numbers suggest the shape of a test. Connect the HubSpot beta before spending, so Reddit-sourced contacts land against accounts in the CRM. Run Max with in-market audiences next to a community-targeted campaign aimed at the subreddits your buyers already use. Reddit applies in-market audiences inside Max's automation, so only the side-by-side shows what they add. Restrict both to your account list through Bombora or Demandbase if you run either. Then judge the two on one rate, the share of Reddit-sourced sales-qualified accounts that reach opportunity, set against the same rate for LinkedIn.
My bet is that the community-targeted campaign wins that comparison for security buyers, because a subreddit like r/sysadmin has already done the qualifying that an in-market model is guessing at. The first quarter of opportunity data, read in HubSpot rather than in Reddit's own dashboard, will settle it.
A campaign tuned to cheap form fills finds the cheapest form-fillers.
Run Max with in-market audiences beside a community-targeted campaign, and judge both on the share of Reddit-sourced sales-qualified accounts that reach opportunity, read in HubSpot rather than in Reddit's dashboard.
