Snapchat has grown tremendously in popularity over the past several years, especially among younger demographics. As of 2022, Snapchat has over 363 million daily active users worldwide. With such a large and engaged user base, Snapchat advertising presents a major opportunity for brands looking to reach younger audiences.
There are several key benefits that make Snapchat a potentially valuable advertising platform.
Reaching Younger Demographics
Snapchat’s user base skews very young. As of 2022, 90% of Snapchat’s daily active users are between the ages of 13 and 34. This makes Snapchat uniquely positioned to reach Millennial and Gen Z audiences, who often prove elusive to marketers using more traditional advertising mediums.
Snapchat provides the ability to reach massively sized audiences of users in these coveted younger demographics. For brands targeting younger consumers, the audience reach potential of Snapchat is a major benefit of advertising on the platform.
Vertical Video Ads
Snapchat popularized vertical video ads, with full screen vertical video emerging as a defining feature of the Snapchat ad experience. These vertical videos are well-suited to mobile devices and align with how users naturally engage with content on their phones.
Vertical video represents an innovative ad format that provides an immersive experience for Snapchat users. The vertical orientation occupies the entire screen, capturing user attention in a way that horizontal mobile video ads often struggle to achieve.
Snapchat advertising also allows brands to optimize their ads for mobile devices specifically. This provides an engaging ad experience tailored to the predominant way users interact with Snapchat.
Interactive Ad Options
Snapchat enables robust interactive elements within ads, facilitating engagement from users. Brands can incorporate polls, questions, links, app installs, and more within their Snapchat ads.
These interactive ad components allow Snapchat users to engage directly with the ads they are seeing. This creates opportunity for further exposure to the brand’s messaging and products. The level of interactivity in Snapchat ads differentiates them from the more passive ad consumption on platforms like TV and print.
Adding interactive elements to Snapchat ads provides brands with creative ways to generate user engagement and data collection. The interactive ad options on Snapchat give brands capabilities to turn ads into more of an experience rather than just a one-way broadcast.
Innovation Opportunities
Snapchat has repeatedly demonstrated a penchant for innovation, pioneering multiple advertising formats that had never been seen before. Examples include vertical video ads, augmented reality lenses, and Collection ads.
For brands seeking an innovative edge in their advertising efforts, Snapchat presents an intriguing opportunity. The platform has shown a consistent ability to roll out fresh, novel ad experiences. Brands can latch onto these innovations early and be among the first to test cutting-edge ad formats.
Advertising on Snapchat provides a way to experiment with emergent ad experiences and tap into creativity. The innovation coming from Snapchat offers marketers options to reinvent branding and reach audiences through new interactive formats. The constant stream of innovations from Snapchat keeps their ad offerings feeling fresh and on the pulse of what connects with younger users.
Transient Messaging
Snapchat pioneered the concept of transient messaging, with Snaps disappearing after they are viewed. This ephemeral nature of Snapchat content adds urgency and novelty to the platform’s advertising capabilities.
Snapchat ads often garner attention because users know they will not last. Brands can play into this by creating ads that feel like must-see content for the day. Limited time offers and deals can also drive immediate response, as users know the offering will disappear fast just like organic Snapchat content.
Leveraging the ephemeral aspect of Snapchat in ad messaging provides brands opportunities for urgency and excitement. The temporary nature of Snaps trains users to pay attention to content right away before it is gone, which brands can utilize to craft ads that feel fleeting and exclusive to Snapchat.
Targeting Options
Snapchat provides robust targeting capabilities, enabling brands to hone in on specific demographics and user traits. Ad targeting options on Snapchat include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Contextual filters
Powerful targeting features like these allow brands to define their ideal audience and reach those specific users with the most relevant messaging. Snapchat targeting takes advantage of user profile information and habits to enable more precise ad delivery.
Snapchat also provides premium targeting options for additional specificity like targeting based on offline data. Advanced targeting maximizes the ROI potential of Snapchat ads by focusing budget on only the audiences most likely to engage.
Ads WithinPopular Discover Content
Snapchat Discover features engaging content from top media brands like ESPN, NBC, Vogue, Vice, and more. Snapchat places ads within this popular professional content consumed by millions of users.
Placing ads within Discover content provides fantastic context that enhances relevance and engagement. Brands have the opportunity to embed their ads directly into the daily content habits of Snapchat’s highly engaged user base.
The native advertising environment of Discover offers an organic opportunity for brands to expose their message to a captivated audience. Discover content reaches over 125 million Snapchat users per month, providing massive value for the ad spend.
Social Sharing
User-generated content and word-of-mouth are influential social proof points for modern consumers. Snapchat makes it easy for users to share brand content and recommendations through native social sharing options.
When users choose to share brand content or recommend a brand to friends on Snapchat, it generates valuable organic promotion. This earned media effect can help content go viral quickly within Snapchat’s massive user base.
Social sharing enables brands to incentivize advocacy and capitalize on the credibility users place in friends’ opinions. Activating user sharing provides brands a distribution channel to spread branded content organically on a massive scale.
Augmented Reality
Snapchat introduced augmented reality “lenses” years ago, and continues to innovate in the AR advertising space. AR try-on experiences are gaining significant traction on Snapchat and offer a futuristic advertising avenue.
AR brand lenses allow consumers to engage with products in an interactive, digitally-enhanced format. Popular uses cases include trying on makeup virtually and assessing furniture placement in a room.
The immersive nature of AR ads helps drive product consideration and retail purchases. Snapchat AR ads bring products to life in consumers’ own environments in a uniquely personalized manner. The platform is pioneering AR experiences that form deeper connections between products and consumers.
Sponsored Lenses and Filters
Snapchat’s diverse base of sponsored lenses and filters provides a playful way for brands to engage users. Sponsored lenses overlay branded AR effects and stickers on users’ selfies or photos.
Filters offer a branded design overlay that changes the entire look and feel of Snaps. Examples include adding a branded geofilter for a specific city or event.
These fun overlays offer a softer sell ad approach centered on enrichment rather than interruption. Creative ad options like lenses and filters help brands become part of the Snapchat experience in an organic way.
Snap Ads
Snap Ads appear between user Stories as full-screen vertical video ads. They can run up to 20 seconds and users can swipe to skip after 6 seconds.
These video ads consume the entire screen, capturing user attention. Brands can display Snap Ads to reach broad audiences or target specific demographics based on Snapchat’s robust user data.
In addition to creative video content, Snap Ads enable capabilities like install links, swipe up actions, and web view integrations. The blend of video storytelling and direct response provide a compelling canvas for brands.
Commercials
Snapchat also provides Commercial advertising options. These are short 3 to 60 second video ads played before certain Discover channels and Shows.
Commercials enable brands to align their video ads with premium Snapchat content. The built-in audience of popular Shows and Publisher Stories offers an engaging environment for Commercials.
Video ads consume the full screen for a captive viewing experience. Commercials can drive brand awareness and interest in an immersive setting as a precursor to viewing high-quality content.
Collection Ads
Collection Ads allow brands to showcase multiple products in a unified interactive ad unit. Users can swipe through product pages and tap to expand product details.
This ad format provides a customizable browse experience featuring any number of products. Brands can creatively display product images, videos, descriptions, and CTAs across a series of full screen cards.
Collection Ads are ideal for product releases, promotions, gift guides, seasonal campaigns, or any multi-product campaigns. The interactive format brings a swipeable catalog experience within Snapchat.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads inject user and contextual data into ads in real-time. This allows a brand to personalize ad content to each user based on their profile, behaviors, location, weather, and more.
Personalized dynamic ads perform better because they showcase more relevant products and offers. The automated content customization also scales campaigns and streamlines workflows.
Snapchat Dynamic Ads empower brands to put the right message in front of the right user at the right time. They combine the scale of programmatic with bespoke creative optimized to each viewer.
Web View Ads
Web View Ads feature interactive demos, videos, lead captures, and more within a full-screen in-app web view. Users can tap to engage with interactive brand content without having to leave the app.
For brands with interactive web experiences like shoppable videos, Web View Ads provide a seamless way to showcase that content within Snapchat. This eliminates disruptive redirects while still delivering interactive elements.
Web View Ads expand the storytelling canvas by allowing extended brand engagement and response capture while maintaining the Snapchat user experience. The format facilitates deeper interactivity beyond a basic Snap Ad.
Snap Pixel
The Snap Pixel allows brands to extend their web and app tracking efforts to Snapchat. It enables valuable cross-channel attribution by connecting Snapchat ads to offline conversions.
With Snap Pixel implemented, brands can retarget consumers based on site and app actions. The Pixel also unlocks sophisticated analytics like ROI calculations and lifetime value modeling.
Having a presence across channels is imperative for data-driven marketing. Snap Pixel gives marketers the cross-device visibility needed to cultivate customer intelligence and orchestrate sophisticated campaigns.
Analytics
Robust analytics and reporting help brands track campaign performance and optimize efforts. Snapchat provides in-depth analytics on elements like:
- Impressions
- Reach
- Frequency
- Engagement
- Conversions
- Audience Insights
Brands can dig into audience segmentation data and conversion metrics to identify optimal targets and creatives. Detailed demographic reporting provides perspective on how different age groups and genders respond.
The analytics toolset enables brands to derive deep consumer intelligence to continually improve campaign strategy. Marketers can monitor metrics in real-time and adjust levers like bids, budgets, and creative to drive performance.
Automation
Snapchat provides various levels of automation to make advertising easier to manage. Brands can activate automated bidding to optimize costs or enable automatic creative rotation to serve multiple ad variations.
For advanced streamlining, Snapchat also offers an Automated Creative Engine. This leverages AI to generate thousands of personalized ad variants designed to resonate with different user segments.
Automating campaign management processes frees up strategists to focus on bigger picture planning and creative direction. Automation handles the day-to-day optimization so marketers can go beyond basic campaign administration and provide strategic value.
Creative Flexibility
Snapchat offers tremendous creative flexibility for brands. Ad formats include video, images, illustrations, web experiences, AR try-ons, interactive polls, and more.
This diverse mix of creative options allows brands to showcase their identity and products using innovative ad experiences. Rather than force-fitting brands into predefined templates, Snapchat enables custom creative aligned with campaign goals.
Between multiple ad formats, interactive elements, dynamic content, and AR capabilities, Snapchat fosters an experimental canvas for brands. Storytelling creative is critical to connecting with Snapchat’s young user base in an authentic manner.
Competitive Rates
Snapchat advertising provides extensive audience reach and robust targeting at competitive CPM rates. Average costs per thousand impressions (CPM) run from $2-$10 based on targeting parameters.
CPMs for Snapchat ads are very reasonable particularly given the engaged user base and opportunity for interactivity. Snapchat offers access to a sought-after audience at efficient pricing.
When factoring in the Precise targeting options on Snapchat, the relatively low rates at scale become a major selling point. Sophisticated targeting translates to lower waste and higher ROAS for brands.
Cross-Platform Reach
Snapchat Ads Manager provides unified campaign management and reporting across Snapchat, iOS, Android, and web properties. This enables holistic cross-channel oversight.
Brands can plan sequential campaigns across Snapchat and Instagram or retarget consumers from web to app. The cross-platform environment enriches data collection and attribution analytics.
Consolidated workflows, budgets, and billing all allow for bigger picture orchestration. Snapchat empowers brands to connect the dots across channels for an omnichannel advertising strategy.
Conclusion
Snapchat has proven itself as a viable and valuable advertising platform, particularly for brands focused on reaching younger consumers. The combination of audience reach, innovative ad experiences, precise targeting, and competitive rates make Snapchat an important channel in a modern brand’s marketing mix.
As Snapchat continues growing its user base and evolving its advertising offerings, the opportunities within the platform will only expand further. The undeniable popularity and engagement of the Snapchat experience translates into major upside for brands to make an advertising impact.
For advertisers looking to influence Millennial and Gen Z audiences, Snapchat simply can’t be ignored. The platform offers interactive, immersive ad experiences on an unprecedented scale. Snapchat will continue asserting itself as a cultural force and meaningful advertising environment connecting brands with the next generation of consumers.