How To Brand Build And Create More Effective Ads On Snapchat

In order to shed some light on how our advertising partners are finding success on our platform, we partnered with Kantar and their Balanced Attribution product to decompose brand lift studies and understand what ultimately drove lift across key brand performance metrics like Ad Awareness and Intent.

Kantar’s Balanced Attribution creates models based off of recurrent neural networks, which ingests event-level media delivery data, as well as user-level brand lift survey responses, to understand how variables like ad format, frequency, and creative features contributed to lift. For the study, 52 total campaigns were ingested which included over 50,000 respondents and 630,000 Snapchat ad exposures being used for analysis across US, KSA, France, and Australia.

Within the playbooks, we provide insights into contributors of lifts in Intent, recommended budget allocations between content ads and camera ads, creative performance, and effective frequencies. While we evaluated vertical and region-specific insights to develop a foundation for learning agenda frameworks, we identified four patterns across the outputs that may help guide all marketers activating their first branding campaign on Snapchat. 

Firstly, the performance of your campaign isn’t solely dependent on a single factor, like the creative or frequency alone. In fact, they work together in varying ways and we found that contributions can differ depending on the metrics we looked at. 

For example, we found that frequency was a more significant contributor to Ad Awareness lift, while ad format was found to be more important to Intent lift. This would mean that that frequency of exposure can help raise upper funnel metrics, while the ways in which Snapchatters can engage with your brand across the app is more meaningful for driving action.

The best way to plan a Snapchat campaign starts with leveraging multiple ad formats on Snapchat, which not only ensures that you’re reaching all different types of Snapchatters, but provides increased performance over a single format alone. Furthermore, leveraging both content and camera ads provide the most benefit.

To take this further, our second finding from our Kantar Balanced Attribution study showcased how higher budget levels benefited from increased allocation of resources into our camera-based formats, which included Lenses and Filters, in order to maximize lifts in Intent. As target audiences become saturated with Content Ads, which includes Commercials, Snap Ads, and Story Ads, at higher levels, the reallocation of budget towards Camera Ads helps with incremental reach, as well as building differentiated frequency.

When your customers see your brand from different perspectives and get to interact with them in those contexts, not just on Snapchat, but across your entire marketing plan, you build a relationship that ultimately drives them towards purchase. With the utilization of multiple ad formats providing incremental reach between each other, leveraging a wider library of creatives to power those formats creates synergies in building differentiated frequency. In other words, an exposure that still delivers the same message but in a different way compared to other creatives in the mix. This emulates how your audience gets exposed to your brand in the wild, but all on the Snapchat platform.

And finally, in knowing that additional formats and creatives can help to drive action amongst Snapchatters, it’s important to know that thinking about our platform as a single marketing channel can leave performance on the table. On average, across the studies included in this campaign, we found that a frequency of 4x/week drove about three-quarters of total possible Intent lift, with the model predicting total saturation at 8x/week.

When marketers start to think about how partnering with Snapchat is more than buying an impression on a single channel, it opens new doors into how they create a holistic experience for their customers that drive differentiated frequency.

The myriad of ad formats we offer helps to create a 360 immersive experience for your brand to engage with Snapchatters. These general guidelines we’ve uncovered in our partnership with Kantar should be used as a starting point to create a holistic experience for your audience and to kickstart ideas on how to build a path towards the most optimal campaign that is specific to your brand through the use of learning agendas and testing frameworks.