It’s been 10 years since Snapchat was born to find its way to millions of phones. With several social media channels undergoing massive disruption, Snapchat has stood the test of time.
Snapchat advertising has proven to be highly remunerative and, frankly, fun. With more than 550 million active users, Snapchat has received massive growth between 2020 and 2022.
Almost 300 million people use Snapchat daily, with an average of 30 minutes on the app, leveraging the marketing potential for brands to drive traffic and maximum leads.
Surprisingly, when advertisers talk about social media advertising, Snapchat ads tend to get overlooked. However, in reality, it is proven to be better than ever for brands, with a consistent rise in usage yearly.
Snapchat is quite a versatile and flexible platform and can help you save time on campaign optimization. Also, starting with Snap ads isn’t expensive either, as it has a minimum daily spend requirement of $5, extending plenty of room for experimenting with messaging, creatives, and campaigns.
It is the most preferred choice for 15 to 25-year-olds, with 48% using it daily and 35% of the total considering it the most significant social media channel. Snap advertising successfully caters to 75% of all Millenials and Gen-Zs.
With such exciting features, Snapchat has become the latest and most worthy brand marketing channel. It enables them to connect with the audience in real-time, especially when out and about. Snapchat is most suitable for local campaigns and for telling compelling and interactive stories.
Advertisers view Snapchat as a host to the younger generation. Well, there’s a truth to that, too, but Snapchat reaches many hence it’s a novel marketing channel worth trying.
Like other social platforms, Snapchat has its own advertising offerings. Depending on your advertising goals and budget, Snapchat provides various techniques to increase your ROI effectively.
Types and Formats of Snapchat Ads
With seamless advertisement integration, Snapchat is an excellent and potential marketing platform. Once the goals for the Snapchat campaign are determined, ads should be considered thoroughly as what would work best in your brand’s favour to get the utmost engagement.
Well, Snap ads come in a variety of flavours, and each of them is versatile on its own. You need to pick the most suitable one. Let’s try them one by one.
Story Ads
Snapchat story ads are displayed in the discover section of the application. When users tap over it, a collection of ads appears. For this ad, Snapchat itself lays out the format based on the required assets, including a headline, a brand anime, attachments if you plan for a swipe-up, and individual files for each ad within the story. Snapchat story ads provide a branded content experience with a narrative to engage users quickly.
Collection Ads
Collection ads are the most recent development Snapchat rolled out. These ads allow the advertiser to display a collection of products with an interactively seamless way to shop. If you haven’t seen a collection ad, it looks like a regular Snapchat video with a series of thumbnail-size products at the bottom.
Collection ads are usually based on product catalogues, allowing to display of dynamic product features. However, there are more requirements to proceed with this ad since it has more pieces than just a simple ad.
Single Image or Video Ads
These are fullscreen mobile ads in any format, from videos to photos to gifs or even a combination. These ads can be used for business objectives like sales and brand awareness or even to boost engagements. They appear between different types of content, such as stories, publisher content or creator content, convincing users to take immediate action.
Commercial Ads
These are non-skippable 5 seconds video ads that can be up to 3 minutes long. They appear within the Snapchat curated content. Standard commercial ads are non-skippable for 3 to 6 seconds; however, extended play commercials last from 7 to 180 seconds, of which only the first 6 seconds are non-skippable.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads will be the most suitable option if you want to target users with products they are interested in. For instance, if someone skips out of the website, leaving the cart abandoned, then Snapchat will generate an ad and display it to them. They are regular Snapchat ads, but the only difference is that these are only displayed to the ones who have already interacted with your brand.
Lenses
Monetize your Snapchat interaction with lenses. Users were captured first with amusing Snapchat filters, as who doesn’t want to click incredible snaps? Through this ad type, brands create interactive moments via augmented reality.
There are two types of lenses: Face Lens and World Lens. Face lenses are featured to focus on one’s eyes, nose, mouth, and head to transform into characters your brand creates. In contrast, a World lens detects your location to locate your surroundings.
Don’t forget to add a brand name or logo to your lenses, and make sure to place it at the top right or left corner, as Snapchat recommends.
Filters
In addition to lenses, users can also add filters to their snaps. Filters are artistic overlays appearing after taking a snap when being swiped left or right. With sponsored filters, advertisers make a way to Snapchatters conversations with innovative features to promote brand awareness.
This can be both generic and specific. For example, Geofilters are used 2 billion times per day to target geographical areas. Remember the puppy face filter on Snapchat? The audience went crazy for it, and indeed every advertiser must have wished to be the designer of that when seeing its immense success. Filters with great success or viral ones can be heavily utilized for brand awareness.
A Guide to Creating Effective Snapchat Ads
Choose an Objective for Your Campaign
Firstly you need to set the advertising objectives of what you would want the viewers to do when they see your ad, either drive traffic to the website or app installation, boost awareness or generate views. Then you are required to set a schedule. You can either start immediately or define the timelines. Also, it would be best if you named your ad campaign as it helps find it.
Set Up the Audience, Budget, and Schedule of Your Ad
With the name of the campaign being decided, you need to be specific with the audience. You can specify the audience as per their geographical location, age, gender, language, income, or based on users’ interests too. Setting a specific target audience helps you achieve better results.
Afterwards, you need to decide on the budget. Ad delivery is optimized for the goal and per the specified bid amount. If you are not getting the desired results, bids can be increased for better reach. Once done, your next step would be to schedule the ad. Since multiple ads can run within each ad campaign, the ads might have a shorter schedule than their ad campaign.
Select an Ad Type and Create Your Ad Set
After the above steps, you are ready to create your Snapchat ad; first, you need to select your ad type. You can also test which ad type works best and t for you. In addition, you need to complete a few more steps to create your ad. You are almost done with creating one with details like brand name, headline, and CTA and attaching the media file. The final step would be to fill in all these and upload your attachment.
Run a Campaign
Gladly, you are there! Click the button labelled launch campaign, and your ad campaign is good to go. Congratulations if this helps you to set up your first Snapchat ad campaign.
Monitor Your Ads and Measure the Success
With every platform providing a suite of analytics, Snapchat has this feature too. The platform helps you improve your campaign targeting and marginal costs. After launching the ad campaign, monitor its performance, and edit the schedule or budget to report the results.
All this can be easily done in the dashboard of Snapchat ads manager. The overall analytics and insights will be displayed on the dashboard. You can also edit your ad schedule and budget as per the results if needed.
Conclusion
Snapchat is ideally preferable for Millenials and Gen-Zs. However, versatile objectives such as creating awareness, generating engagements, building leads, and driving traffic and views can all be done with Snapchat ads manager.
The platform offers multiple creative ad types, predefined segments for the audience and powerful analytical split testing that will help flourish your brand.
All in all, Snapchat has a robust advertising platform that allows brands to achieve speedy success.
Now that you have learned a detailed guide to Snapchat ads, you can start with your first Snapchat ad campaign.
And wait, don’t forget to check out Snapchat’s Advertising Policies and Guidelines, as your content might get removed in case of violation.
Good luck!
