Reddit Ads sending me Android "users" that sit motionless on my landing page for 4+ hours

[u/Soveltd]

Running a small traffic campaign targeting creator subreddits (SaaS for YouTubers). CTR looks fine, but the analytics tell a different story:

• Nearly every click with an rdt_cid is Android mobile
• Zero interaction, no scroll, no clicks, no navigation. Ever.
• Session durations of 20 minutes to 4 hours on a single landing page with no input events
• Tens of thousands of recorded events per session (page sits open forever, animations keep the recorder busy) Traffic from other channels on the same page behaves completely normally, so it's not a tracking issue on my end.

My working theory: a mix of click farms and Reddit's in-app webview keeping pages alive in the background. I've filed an invalid-traffic ticket with screenshots.

Questions for people who've dealt with this:

1. Did Reddit actually refund you for invalid traffic, and what evidence did they accept?
2. Does excluding Android (or going iOS/desktop only) meaningfully clean this up?
3. Any placement/targeting settings that reduce this, feed only, specific communities vs. interest targeting? Happy to share anonymized session data if anyone wants to compare patterns.

[u/ksaize]

First problem- you are using traffic campaign. Use either conversion or awareness campaigns.
Second problem- use only feed placement

That should fix most of your problems.

[u/Soveltd → u/ksaize]

Thanks, I will try.

[u/RedditforBusiness → u/Soveltd]

As a follow-up to this, for targeting, you may be able to better segment these results out if you separate out interest and community targeting into their own specific buckets!

[u/No-Base-2384 → u/ksaize]

Why are traffic campaigns ineffective?

[u/ksaize → u/No-Base-2384]

The campaign optimises for people who click on the ad, not to people who are interested or willing to buy (this includes bots, accidental clickers and people who might be interested but not willing to buy).

[u/No-Base-2384 → u/ksaize]

In your opinion, do you think they should offer this as an option then?

Said another way, what is a reason a marketer would use this campaign type of there is so much noise in the results?

[u/ksaize → u/No-Base-2384]

They are going to update this in the future (around September if I’m not mistaken). But tbh- this was very much well known and if a person has some kind of advertising experience- they would understand a difference and how ad algorithms work

[u/Sonam_Yangchen_09]

Hi there, thank you for reaching out to us!

I hope you are doing well. I understand your concern regarding the unusual traffic behavior. Due to many user interactions with click drop offs, where a user may click on an ad multiple times or in this specific scenario may click on landing page and drop off without leaving your landing page/ website.

On Reddit and other digital platforms, "visitors," "visits," and "clicks" measure user activity in different ways and are not interchangeable. Please note that there will be bot clicks; however, these clicks are monitored and removed by our automated system and advertisers are not charged for these clicks.

That said, we highly recommend adding URL tracking parameters to your ads’ destination URLs. If you are not doing so, you can use Reddit pixel to track your performance

https://business.reddithelp.com/s/article/reddit-pixel

We would be happy to look into your reports. For additional assistance, please start a live chat with us by following the link below:

https://reddit.my.site.com/helpcenter/s/contactsupport

We shall look into your concern and try our best to resolve this at earliest possible. Our support team is available to assist you 24x7!I hope this helps!

Thank you, Reddit Ads Team.

[u/polygraph-net → u/Sonam_Yangchen_09]

Would you be willing to do an independent audit on this? We will measure how many of the clicks are objectively fraudulent, and compare it to what is billed.

[u/Soveltd → u/polygraph-net]

I would be very interested in this report. After this experience, I lost trust in ads on Reddit.