Alexis Kestler
Have you ever think of Snapchat as a marketing tool? Probably not. But if you are reading this post, you must be interested in it. We will tell you what type of Snapchat Ads campaigns you can find and what works well there.
Did you know that a lot of big brands use advertising on Snapchat and spend huge amounts of money on it? Why? Snapchat has almost 250 million daily active users and they open the app more than 30 times per day. Its audience is totally different than any other network, mostly a lot younger. That doesn’t mean marketing won’t work if your ideal audience is older. Sometimes we have to step out of our boundaries (in this case, out of FB/IG ads) and try something new.
If you relied on Facebook advertising until now, you might be happy to hear that Snapchat is presenting cost-per-miles (CPM) which are up to high 10 times cheaper than Facebook! Campaigns are cheaper probably because they are not so high-demanded as in other platforms. Plus, the whole process of advertising on Snapchat is relatively easy.
Ad Types and Options
Snapchat campaigns can be optimized by choosing your advertising goal. That is the first thing your Snap Ads Manager will ask you. You can choose between website visits, promoting local place, calls and texts, app installs, and app visits:
When you click on your choice, you will get an option to upload your photo. If you’ve chosen “website visits”, you can import photos from your website.
Next, you will get options to design your ad, with a catchy preview on the right side. This is where you will fill in your info and decide how you want your ad to look like.
An interesting and very helpful feature here is using a call to action. You can choose between dozen of options, such as: apply now, book now, more, sign up, shop now, view, etc.
Audience
Creating your audience is also very simple, and somehow similar to Facebook. It is worth mentioning that you can upload your list and create lookalike audiences, or start fresh. First, you need to set demographic options:
Then, location:
You are also able to add advanced targeting. That means you can set the interests of your audience. There is seriously a lot of options! From lifestyles, film preferences, fitness enthusiasm, all the way to meme watchers and social drinkers. (I’ve actually had a lot of fun investigating this part!)
In the end, you can choose on which devices you want to run your ad.
As in a Facebook campaign, you also need to set your budget, duration, add info and payment details. During the setup, there is an overview on the right side so you can optimize your campaign at its best. You can see audience overview and delivery estimates.
There is also an option to retarget once your campaign has started and given some results. You can add people who have seen your video or swiped, for example, to your retargeting list. This retargeting based on ad engagement can have a very positive effect, as it assumes that these people are interested in your product or service. From there, you can easily create a lookalike audience.
Ad Types
There is a handful of ad types on Snapchat you can choose from. Most people strive towards a single image or video, or story ad.
Single image/video ads are shown in the stories feed, very similar to Instagram stories ads. They will appear while you are looking at stories. These ads are usually between 6 and 15 seconds long.
Story ads are shown in a discover feed as a branded content. Users can tap on it, and then they will see a series of images or videos. It can be up to 2 minutes long, with 15 seconds segments. These were proved to be very effective because they are opt-in based. And also, it is very efficient when you tell the story with your ad, not just pushing your product.
There are also collection ads, which are shown in the user’s story feed as thumbnails at the bottom of their video you can tap on. They can be up to 3 minutes long.
You can also decide to put an unskippable ad that is shown within other selected content. It can be between 6 seconds and 3 minutes long.
It is important to say that no matter which ad type you choose, Snapchat charges you by CPM. And the action is always “swipe up”.
Snapchat ads can pay off very well for you if you target the right people. But the platform is still not for everyone, so you might want to give it a try and decide by watching the results. Let us know how it went!
