So what’s the deal with Snapchat ads, are they right for you and your business? Can Snapchat ads help diversify your ads? Savannah Sanchez, founder of The Social Savannah, shared her insight on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.
Snapchat Ads
Savannah started out the Snapchat department at the eCommerce ad agency she was working at at the time. She was able to get a lot of ad accounts for many big brands, and later she decided to work as a consultant on her own. She works with companies like Printy Pets, BlendJet, Kitsch, Our Place, and Doe Lashes.
So why Snapchat ads? Snapchat boasts 230 million active daily users who use the app for at least 30 minutes per day 30 times per day. The 13-24 year old demographic is key, as they exclusively use the app over Facebook and even Instagram. 13 to 24 year olds are reached via Snapchat over the other two apps in the United States, Canada, France, and Australia.
Another key group are young moms who are 30 and older, which Savannah says provide “insanely high return on ad spend.” She says it’s important to try out and diversify ad spending instead of just relying on Facebook ads. Additionally, Snapchat delivers CPMs at 5-10 times less the cost of Facebook, most likely because Snapchat is not as overcrowded with advertisers like Facebook is.
Videos Perform Better Than Images
Snapchat campaigns are great for non-eCommerce companies when it comes to brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, app installs, as well as video views. For eCommerce companies, these campaigns offer website conversion campaigns that can help with adding to cart and optimizing towards a purchase goal.
For example, a feature that can be utilized in the Discover feed is the video views campaign, which includes a call to action and is run as a non-skippable 6 second ad.
There are several different options when it comes to Snapchat advertisements. Savannah steers a majority of her clients’ budgets to video ads, story ads, and single image ads.
Single image or video ads can be seen in a viewer’s Story feed and actually interrupt the user’s experience much like Instagram Stories ads. These can range between 6 to 15 seconds long, but most are about 10 seconds long.
Story ads are found in the Discover feed as branded tiles that are located right next to the organic tiles. Ads that are tapped on can be up to 2 minutes long and are made up of segments that are 15 seconds long, either of images or videos.
Snapchat’s Main Demographic Is 13 to 24 Years Old
Story ads are quite effective because of the fact that they are opt-in and also because they tell a story within 1-2 minutes as opposed to straight up pitching the product.
There are also collection ads available which show four product tiles that are tappable and are also served in the user’s Stories feed. These can go up to 3 minutes long and also are good for removing the barrier to purchase.
One important thing to keep in mind according to Savannah is that while it is important to run ads with sound, it’s important to remember that many users will have the sound muted. That means that the ad should still make sense without any sound. She recommends including captions with a font that is native to Snapchat so that the ads still feel organic.
She also recommends using video over images as they tend to perform better. If you do choose to use images, make sure to add in a GIF or some sort of animation to keep things interesting.
