What To Expect When You Start Advertising On Snapchat
If you’re a marketer, you are always looking for a hot new platform to reach your audience. If Snapchat isn’t already on your radar, it should be. Yet we’ve all heard reservations and predictions about the future of Snapchat — from Evan Spiegel being too secretive to declining user growth at the hands of Facebook feature ripoffs.
I’m uniquely positioned to comment on Snapchat’s advertising platform. For years, I managed digital ads for Google’s most strategic brands. Now I lead marketing for Keepsafe Software, where I’ve kicked the tires on Snapchat’s offering. I also have a teenage daughter who provides me with added perspective on Snap’s market and reach.
Last summer, my digital marketing agency and I decided to run a test on Snapchat’s platform. We were looking for new advertising platforms to fuel our rapid growth and suspected Snapchat’s demographic might be a fit for our mobile privacy apps.
Snapchat advertising is a mystery in plain sight.
Advertising on Snapchat six months ago was mysterious, but its impressive creative and demographics speak for themselves. Snapchat is one of the only platforms where you can reach the ever-elusive 13-17 age group (though we chose not to advertise to anyone under 18). Its platform demographic also skews heavily toward 18-24 and 25-34 audiences in North America. Snapchat’s daily active users visit the app 18 times per day and spend 30 minutes on the app daily, and 60% of them also create daily snaps.
Good creative is hard to make.
So, how do you actually produce Snapchat creative? In order to do it right, it can’t be too slick. Even the biggest brands with expensive creative agencies don’t have a leg up without staff accustomed to making scrappy ads that look like messages from friends. This can be a significant barrier.
When we were considering how to produce our own creative for the platform, our Snap rep sent over two examples. The first ad showed a woman in a sports bra pumping iron. With good lighting and professional camera angles, it was too polished and unmemorable. The second ad looked like it had been filmed on a phone. Two people made jokes about a stinky car and advertised Febreze. Our sales rep said, “Febreze crushed it.”
The key is finding Snapchat natives who have mastered the less than ten-second video format. The ad should also convey the value or problem your product solves with humor. Try filming on a phone and add creative effects in post-production that look like Snapchat filters. Reinforce your brand at the end with your logo and company name.
While these examples helped us glean what kind of creative worked best on Snapchat, we had our doubts about whether our goals were aligned with Febreze’s — and whether its ad actually resulted in increased sales.
It’s important to set campaign goals.
Once we set up our ads, I started receiving daily receipts for our spend. When I reached out to see if I could get a monthly receipt rather than daily emails, our rep said Snapchat didn’t yet have that capability. This was annoying for me and for my colleague in finance who had to deal with daily receipts for accounting.
There was a silver lining, though. Daily receipts allowed me to see how wildly our spend varied from day to day. Some of this was due to our efforts to optimize delivery, but it was also surprising to see Snapchat’s system fluctuate between $0.37 of spend one day to $157 another.
This is another reason why it’s so important to set campaign goals at the outset. We wanted to drive revenue-positive installs and learn what creative performed best within our test budget. Because we set a campaign budget, we knew we would stop serving our ads after we hit it. Snapchat’s spend variation highlighted the challenges of its system but made it easier to keep track of our revenue goals and budget in real time.
Curated campaigns perform better.
If your company uses install attribution and analytics software, ask about tools that can help you create lookalike audiences in Snapchat. These audiences have similar attributes to the people who use your product. When you are able to hone in on the right audience, you are much more likely to hit your targets and your campaigns will ultimately perform better.
We tried cost-per-install (CPI) bidding first, but it didn’t take long to realize our ads weren’t serving. Eventually, we found more success with CPI bidding by curating broad audiences ourselves. It took trial and error, escalations to our Snap rep and troubleshooting, but we finally got our CPI down 80%. Testing showed us what creative elements performed best, and we have another test in the making.
Our top-performing ads (view them here and here) used romantic comedy humor with male and female actors in our target demographic. They showed funny (strife-inducing) scenarios in which the actors should have used Keepsafe’s Photo Vault product. These ads had the most installs at the most efficient CPI while reaching our target demographic. Make sure that your campaign success metrics align with campaign goals and draw out insights you can apply to future campaigns.
It’s still early for Snap.
Last fall, the ads platform was nascent at best. While Snap is iterating quickly, for it to build a competitive business model and compete with entrenched online advertising players, it will need to develop a platform that’s best in class. Snap is primarily focused on nurturing big brands. After all, big brands have big marketing budgets. But Snap will ultimately have to figure out how to monetize advertisers in its torso and tail to be triumphant.
But despite the fumbles we experienced, I remain optimistic. Snapchat has a track record for creativity. It can extend its trademark originality to its advertising platform, improve its execution and win big. Even at this early stage, Snap has the most innovative creative formats available. Snapchat also offers brands exciting ways to engage with new audiences. That’s why we’re continuing to allocate some of our marketing budget to Snapchat this year.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com.