Snapchat is the newest exciting platform which has launched advertising opportunities. It is definitely still a very fresh and unexplored territory by advertisers, except for a few big brands. This is what makes it exciting as a lot of opportunities lie there.

  The problem with new products is usually the risk of overspending and not reaching the right audience, not getting the right content straight away and the unavoidable platform glitches and rapid changes.

Despite the risk, soon Snapchat will be part of the relevant world of PPC and we as marketers must find our way to reach people there.

How does Snapchat advertising work?

  At the moment Snapchat advertising is not available as a self-service option. From June Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc. will start offering advertising to all users. Until now marketers had to contact Snapchat directly in order to put ads on the platform.

Snap Inc is launching Mobile Ad Manager. This will be available as an app allowing preview, pause, edit and managing of ads on Snapchat. The other tool is called Business Manager. It will allow managing permissions of team members, billing and managing of multiple Snapchat accounts.

  Soon advertisers will have access to Snapchat Advertising Manager, an ad building platform. It is quite similar to the Ad Builder of Facebook. From Snapchat’s website we can see that targeting options will be also similar to what Facebook’s. Way too similar.

Some of them are:

1. Lifestyle categories.    

   They are based on the data collected from the platform. Snapchat will offer 60 interest categories like parenting, political news, music festivals, and more,

2. Demographics.   This is the most interesting one, as I am curious on what Snapchat can offer to compete with Facebook. Hints that language, graduating school, parenting and household income will be available as targeting filters are making me impatient
3. Location.    Country, state, region or city will all be available as targeting filters.
4. Device Attributes. Like Facebook targeting by device, operating system, carrier, and cellular connectivity will be available.

Custom Audiences.

  Snapchat introduces almost the same options which Facebook has at the moment. The three kinds of remarketing are remarketing to lists of contacts, lookalike audiences and Snapengagement Audiences. Snapengagement gathers users who have interacted with Snap Ads, Geofilters, or Lenses in your past campaigns. Remarketing to web visitors with cookies will not be available.

Partners Audiences.

  Another exciting feature are the new audiences, developed with partners. In partnership with Oracle, Snapchat will offer 85 shopper audiences.  Some of them are luxury apparel shoppers, pet owners, and business travellers. They are all based on offline purchase behaviour.

Another filter of 33 predefined and targetable comScore audiences is based on TV and movie viewership.

In partnership with PlaceIQ, advertisers will be able to reach Snapchatters based on the places they visit over the course of their day.

Ad Formats

1. Snap Ad – Up to 10-second vertical video, with the option to add an interactive element one swipe away. 
2. Snap Ad + Article – Articles can include text, in-line videos that autoplay, animated GIFs, images and galleries.
3. App Install – One swipe opens an embedded App Store or Google Play Store page. One tap later, the app installs in the background.
4. Long Form Video – This can be trailer or how-to video. It has to be minimum 15 seconds and it is giving an opportunity to skip or watch the entire one.
5. Web View. This ad format pre-loads the website an advertiser chooses and allows then the user to swipe in order to access the website. An example is a campaign by Under Armour with a website of a game which allows users to play in Snapchat.

  Other types of ad format are sponsored Geofilters and Lenses. The Geofilters are filters available to users in locations chosen by the advertisers. For example, while rinding an Uber you have access personalised filters on Snapchat.

Lenses allow users to play with the ad and create videos and selfies. An example would be Coca Cola and their Caribbean Carnival lenses which were part of their That is Gold Campaign.

 We are living in truly exciting times for paid online. Until they release more on the new advertising opportunities, have patience and happy targeting!