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Math was always my favorite subject in elementary and middle school. In high school, outside of the classroom, I started playing fantasy sports, spending waaaaay too much time evaluating stats and matchups while things like Billy Beane’s sabermetrics were developing and becoming more commonplace. Today, my colleagues know that I’m (maybe annoyingly) as likely to talk marketing strategy with my clients as I am to talk data. While everyone may not be quite as enthusiastic as I am, nowadays I’m certainly not alone in how frequently I look at numbers and data.
Marketers live and breathe in a competitive world dominated by data. In paid search, we’re constantly working on improving prominent metrics, such as Quality Score, click-through rate, or cost per conversion. But often, we become focused on simple, core metrics and don’t take a look at the bigger picture.
Return on ad spend, or ROAS, however, does provide a look at the bigger picture. This metric offers greater insight into not only what’s leading to conversions, but also the amount of revenue our conversion actions are generating.
Now, I’ll explain why you need to be looking at conversion values and your cost per conversion value in order to optimize your account for ROAS for better campaign performance.
Conversion Volume Alone Doesn’t Tell the Entire Story
Not all conversions are created equal. It’s up to us as marketers to create appropriate conversion actions that show accurate successes in our advertising efforts. A common metric used to determine the success of a paid search campaign is CPA, or cost per conversion. While very useful for measuring volume of conversions, it only measures the average cost associated with any one, single action.
Let’s take a look at two ad groups below.
Each ad group spent $100 and accrued one conversion, giving us identical costs per conversion of $100. When we evaluate the value of each conversion, though, we see a different picture. We see one ad group generated $50 from that $100 spent and the other generated $300, giving us a ROAS 0.5 and 3.0, respectively—a significant difference in return for the same amount spent! Achieving a ROAS of less than one is a losing effort, as you’re earning less than $1 for every $1 spent. The ROAS of 3.0 is showing that for every $1 we spent on ads in that ad group, we earned $3 back from that conversion (a 200% return).
Calculating the return on ad spend is a simple equation.
In a profit-focused strategy, the goal is to achieve as high of a ROAS as possible. Profit margin will differ by industry, but common benchmarks fall between a 3.0 to 4.0 ROAS, so our goal is to meet and exceed these benchmarks.
Determining Your Revenue and Tracking Conversion Value
In order to measure ROAS and view this metric in Google Ads, you’ll need to add conversion values to your conversion actions. Setting up tracking with conversion values can be achieved with a flat value for each action or a dynamic amount tied to a unique transaction. If you’re advertising for an ecommerce business, setting up dynamic conversion values is often a straightforward process. Many modern shopping cart platforms have a streamlined process to include the transaction-specific value to each conversion action and require just a bit of modification in the code on your website.
If you’re not in ecommerce and can’t take advantage of transaction-specific values, such as most lead generation campaigns, a more manual or flat calculation would be required.
In this instance, you’d want to take into consideration post-conversion metrics, such as the rate of you or your sales team turning a lead into an actual customer, as well as the average monetary value that customer generates.
For a hypothetical example, let’s say that you do lead gen and that you close 10% of all new leads. If each of these leads creates $5,000 of value, then you would multiply the value per customer by the lead/customer close rate and get a value of $500. In this scenario, a $500 CPA would lead to a ROAS of 1.0; a $250 CPA would lead to a ROAS of 2.0; a $166.67 CPA would lead to a ROAS of 3.0 … I think you all get the pattern. Now that you’ve figured out this conversion value, instead of editing code on your site to create a dynamic, conversion-specific value like you would with e-commerce conversion actions, you can assign a flat value to a specific lead generation conversion action, such as a form fill. This will prompt Google Ads to provide a ROAS for your campaigns.
Optimizing Your Account for ROAS
Now that conversion values have been assigned, you can begin optimizing your account! When evaluating your campaigns, you should analyze a sufficient volume of data before deciding how to split out campaigns and/or ad groups. This typically means at least 100 clicks per campaign, though with any seasonality or short-term changes, you may want to have a larger data set for evaluating performance.
As we’ve discussed before, your account and campaigns should be segmented based on a specific offering or close group of offerings. Whether it’s a Search or Shopping campaign, these campaigns should have products and services split out in a way that you are able to achieve a good balance of volume and return.
Let’s take a look at the account below.
The campaign with the highest spend does have the highest volume of conversions, but it also has the lowest ROAS of any campaign with impactful spend. In this scenario, this advertiser should be diving into the campaign with the larger spend and looking at what’s actually working:
Keywords with high spend and no conversions
Search terms that lead to conversions
Negative keywords that don’t make sense for your business
Budget monopolization—an ad group, keyword, or related set of keywords using a lot of the budget with lower return
Often, bidding on search queries that have sales-related context or intent, i.e., “buy,” “shop,” “online,” “sale,” or “cheap,” can result in a higher conversion rate even on these results, even if their shorter-tail keywords without this context results would lead to a higher search volume. Greater context or intent in your keywords can be a huge plus!
With this particular account, we’d want to split out a larger, higher-spending, more general campaign into more segmented campaigns or ad groups that are both more specific and contextual and actually lead to better return!
Because the other, lower-spend campaigns have already been split out into their own respective subsets that lead to stronger returns, the goal would be to continue working on optimizing that larger, less-efficient campaign based on some of the key strategies above. In your own account, continue to review your impression share to ensure that these new, more efficient campaigns aren’t missing out on clicks due to inflated budgets of less efficient campaigns.
Now, I’m going get a bit granular—stay with me.
There’s more than just evaluating search queries and daily budgets that can be used to optimize your account. Continue by thinking of your target audience, and review your metrics across demographics. Do your customers tend to make multiple visits to your site before taking action? Add website visitors as an audience with observation, and include a positive bid modifier. Do your customers make repeat purchases? Add a customer list audience with observation again with a positive bid modifier. You may even look to create entirely separate RLSA campaigns using audience targeting instead of observation!
Tip: Review Your Attribution Model
There are multiple options for attributing conversions beyond the default Last Click attribution model, including single-touch and multi-touch models, each giving you a different way to evaluate what’s truly influencing your conversions.
Branded campaigns, for instance, often have a high ROAS, as a customer may have finally decided to buy your product or inquire about your service, and they quickly searched your brand name before completing your tracked conversion action. You might be missing out on what helped bring that customer to your website before they searched for your brand. Maybe a more general, top-of-funnel search is leading to many first clicks for a future customer—and you never knew it! Those keywords may actually be more valuable than they originally appeared with last click so it’s best to view different models.
If you offer a product or service that has a longer sales cycle, a multi-touch attribution model with a longer conversion windows can provide greater insight as to what keywords are influencing conversions, as partial conversion numbers will accrue.
What about Shopping Campaigns?
Shopping campaigns are a bit different from search campaigns, since there are no keywords, instead using a product feed ideally. With proper segmentation of the product feed into different campaigns and ad groups, using exclusions for product that don’t fit into the appropriate campaign/ad group, you can structure Shopping campaigns to optimize for ROAS, even using a Target ROAS automated bidding strategy if you have sufficient conversion volume.
Additionally, like with the search campaigns we looked at above, shopping campaigns can similarly use negatives to filter out poor search queries and be structured in a way that leads to stronger ROAS.
Shopping campaigns use images from your product feed and can appear more prominent than text ads, have a strong conversion rate, and tend to have lower costs per click than text ads, as well. Because of this, they can be consistent sources of conversions with a great ROAS if you’ve structured your campaigns well!
Next, Review Your Account
If I haven’t bored to death on math, numbers, and revenue, then I hope you start preparing to take a deeper look at your account with revenue and profit in mind. ROAS doesn’t need to be seen as simply an e-commerce metric. Lead generation and ecommerce marketers alike can use this metric to make smart, profitable decisions for their account.
As the examples I provided above often refer to benchmarks, it’s important to review your own products and services to determine an appropriate margin to use when figuring out what a necessary ROAS needs to be for your conversion actions and campaigns.
After reading this, you should have a solid understanding of what ROAS data tells you about your account and how to best take action to optimize. Goals may differ across your different campaigns, but the end goals remain the same: increasing your profits and allowing you to grow your business.
One of the hardest tasks in digital marketing is setting the budget for your campaign. Too high, and it leaves room for unspent budget and an elevated cost per acquisition (CPA). Too low, and your budget won’t allow for enough clicks in the day to generate enough leads for your campaign to be profitable.
Budget Cat wants all the budget, but should he get it?
Getting Started with Paid Search Budgets
A great place to start is figuring out what the average cost per click (CPC) is for your industry. Then multiply that number by 10 (ensuring you can fit at least 10 clicks in your day banks on a 10% conversion rate, which is above average for non-branded search).
For example, a pest control company may offer services focusing on rodents and bugs. If rodent clicks come in between $5-$8 per click, while bug clicks are closer to $2-$3 per click, the company would want two campaigns. By having a campaign for rodents (set at $50-$80 per day) and a bug campaign (set at $20-$30 per day), the company would be able to budget for the auction price range in services, honor the value the service brings to their bottom line, and have ad groups that honor the variants on those services.
If that number isn’t realistic for your business, have no fear, there are ways to bypass budget restrictions through compromises on what traffic you receive and when it occurs.
Here are the top three budget-related roadblocks that your campaigns might face, as well as the compromises you can make to get past these blocks and get conversions.
Roadblock #1: Your desired keywords don’t fit the budget, and the budget can’t move.
Compromise: Leverage close variants to get cheaper versions of the keywords you need.
Close variants have been a sore subject for many marketers, as their impact on account structure and the search engine result pages (SERPs) grows. However, this presents an opportunity to select auction prices that make sense for you.
For example, the keywords “personal training,” “personal trainer,” and all the misspellings humans are capable of will bring you the same traffic. Yet, on the average, “personal training” is a cheaper variant than “trainer” because there’s implied transactional value in the “er” variant.
If you can’t live without the traffic coming from that idea but also are strapped for cash, consider only bidding on variants that fit your budget. This is done by pausing close variants with higher auction prices (first position and top of page CPC).
You will still be eligible for the more expensive variants, but because you set your bid for the cheaper one, you’ll only win on those SERPs when the auction price is in line with your business.
Compromise: Turn your expensive ideas into extensions and apply them to branded, competitor, and cheaper service/product campaigns.
Trusting automation to craft extensions may seem seductively practical, but if you find yourself in a budget bind, you’d be best served to resist the urge. There is no limit on what parts of your business site links, price extensions, and other action-oriented extensions can represent. It may make more sense to build extensions highlighting that you offer a service, rather than actively bid on it.
For example, motorcycle accident keywords are more expensive than generic auto accidents. If you’re a lawyer who specializes in all things auto, you’d be better served to include motorcycle accidents as a site link, while bidding on general car accidents. If a prospect really needs you for a motorcycle accident, they can engage with you at the cost of the term you bid on, instead of the premiums associated with the service.
Price extensions are another way to not only get folks to engage with you at a discount, but also prequalify those who engage with you at all. By including the price (even if you use a qualifier, like “starting at” and “up to”), you ensure that only those who have bought into spending that amount with you engage.
Roadblock #2: You need to quickly ramp up leads but don’t have the budget to let Google Search be your volume play.
Compromise: Leverage networks with cheaper auction prices and blitzing power so your search campaign can remarket to them.
Google Search is a powerful lead gen tool because you’re able to put your messaging in front of people actively searching for what you offer. You will also pay a premium for the privilege. When budget’s tight, it’s okay for Google Search to be a second or third phase part of your marketing strategy.
Consider deploying Display, which allows you to blitz your market with your brand, taking advantage of much more affordable CPCs. Display recently started allowing you to bid on a “cost per lead” basis, which will have a slightly higher average CPC, but is still a bargain compared to search.
Facebook charges on a CPM model, and the calculated CPC is dependent on how engaging your copy is (i.e., how many people click on the copy). While it’s true Facebook audience targeting is no longer as robust as it used to be, there’s still a lot of opportunity there to create conversation. Consider leveraging lookalike audiences of your existing customers or page’s fans.
Bing search is often overlooked, and it’s done at an advertiser’s peril. Bing represents close to 40% market share and often is a safe harbor for the priciest industries in Google Search. Bing offers more control over ad group level settings (schedules, location targeting, etc.), and it can be kept up to date via auto-import. Leveraging Bing is especially important if there is no negotiating room on what SERPs you serve for. With an average CPC of $1.54 vs. $2.69, your budget will go further and give you access to Yahoo SERPs.
Impression share lost to rank dominates ☹
Roadblock #3: Budget isn’t exactly the problem – you’re not allowed to bid more than a certain amount per click.
Compromise: Use Bidding strategies designed to teach the source of the bid limit what auction prices you need to deliver value.
I’ll admit, this isn’t a compromise so much as a lesson in profit pragmatism. When a brand doesn’t want to pay more than a certain amount per click, but still wants competitive leads, my favorite tactic is to use “Target Page Location” with a bid cap that is 10% of the daily budget. If we suffer from impression share due to rank, or if the quality of the queries isn’t sound, I now have data to back up why focusing on individual bid cost as opposed to overall ROI is sabotaging the account.
Compromise: Bid only on locations/times that fit your bid restriction.
Just like different ways of searching have different auction prices, so too do different locations, times of day, and devices. If the brand won’t relent, you can set a schedule to only advertise when the auction prices align with the brand. Similarly, you can also add in location bid adjustments, targets, and exclusions honoring the affluence of an area, as well as how easy that location is to service. It’s worth noting that if you target the US and don’t set bid adjustments, your budget will be concentrated in CA, NY, FL, and TX in varying orders. If their auction prices or serviceability do not align with your bottom line, absolutely be empowered to set adjustments.
At the end of the day, so long as bids align with budgets and campaigns are asked to perform one strategic objective, you will be able to fully realize your account’s potential. Don’t be afraid to branch out to other networks to build an audience to focus your budget, especially if you are in an expensive industry.
Looking for more budget tips?
Hear more from Navah in our next live webinar “Budgets, Bids, and Winning New Business in 2019.” Save your seat here now!
Question-related searches are a significant part of the overall searches Google receives each day. Internet Live Stats suggests that there are around 3.5 billion searches per day in 2018, and a study predicted that approximately 8% of search queries are phrased as questions. Find out how you can use question keywords for SEO and traffic.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
WordStream has some impressive employees in its ranks: from industry influencers to marathon runners, from analysts to authors. The Employee Spotlight series aims to highlight the talented individuals who work here. Each month, we’ll be featuring an interview here on the blog and on our social accounts.
For this month’s Employee Spotlight, we spoke with Taylor Chan. As a product manager here at WordStream, Taylor works closely with our engineering and design teams to design and build new product features. Specifically, she oversees basic connections between our flagship software, WordStream Advisor, and ad platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads. She also works on the 20-Minute Work Week (helping you make all your weekly optimizations in 20 minutes!) and a new, exciting feature called Strategies, which we’ll dive into imminently.
Originally from the Philadelphia area, Taylor graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Biological Engineering. She joined WordStream about a year ago, bringing with her no shortage of product development expertise, a passion for shrimp-filled spheres, and an irrefutable mastery of board games.
How long have you worked at WordStream?
I’ve worked here for just over a year— I started December 2017. I came from a company that was much bigger, and everyone was super specialized in their roles. There were four or five flavors of product managers and you had to pick just one. I was really looking to join a smaller team—something that would help me learn a wider range of skills and continue to become more well-rounded. It’s been really great. I’m a lot closer to the strategy aspect of the business than I was previously, which is huge.
How did you hear about WordStream? Why did you want to work here?
I worked in consulting for a little bit—manufacturing consulting. I have done a lot of strange things actually! At that time I was working in a water bottle factory and an almond factory on the ground floor trying to make their lines more efficient. I can’t say I joined WordStream for the marketing aspect, per se, but it’s been very cool learning it. I really didn’t know anything about it beforehand; it’s been crazy to learn what an integral part of our lives it is. But as far as what attracted me to the company, it was more about the people I’d get to work with and the size.
I found WordStream via a random job posting, but once I came in I really gelled with the people on the product team that I interviewed with. They seemed really thoughtful about their choices and what they were doing, which was something I wanted. The conversations felt natural with them.
Can you talk specifics about what your role involves?
I was originally hired specifically for the 20-Minute Work Week. The whole idea of that instantly appealed to me. I’m a person who loves to-do lists, and I’m huge on optimization and efficiency. So the job is really about bringing all those things to our customers at scale. It was really exciting for me. The 20-Minute Work Week is essentially where our customers want to go for quick hits; quick optimizations they can execute on in just a couple of minutes. And then you have the strategy piece where you’re looking for that next big, meaty thing to take your advertising to the next level. That’s the new project I’m spearheading.
Can you talk a little more about that Strategies feature?
Sure. When we say “Strategies” we’re talking about some of the more advanced things our customers can do—things that our customer success team consults them on now. They tend to be pretty complex, and often need to be done over the course of many different sittings. These are things like getting remarketing fired up or creating competitor campaigns or optimizing for mobile. At the moment, these kinds of strategies aren’t really accessible to people who aren’t super familiar with the native platforms. So what we’re trying to do is bring the things our customer success reps are preaching into the software.
That’s really cool. What kind of work goes into that? Is there a timeline for completion?
So it’s not out yet. But the way it works is we have a huge amount of data about all of our different customers, and we’re going to use all that data to identify the top strategies that are right for each customer. So we might find that a particular strategy like RLSAs works well for SaaS (Software as a Service) customers. The software would then automatically recommend that strategy for the customer and prompt them through a nice multi-step flow, a flow that would be both understandable and also faster than manual implementation.
As far as a timeline goes, we’re hoping to come out with the first iteration of the feature in February 2019. There’s a lot of basic work that needs to be done to get the first strategy out the door, but then they should come more rapidly. Ultimately, we’re hoping to have 10+ strategies that span Google, Facebook, and Bing. It’s incredibly challenging, because it involves taking the art that’s in our reps’ heads and getting it down on paper. For instance, how do you actually correctly set up a competitor campaign? And how can we bring that into the software? There are a lot of people here that are bigger marketing experts than I am, so it’s going to require a complete cross-functional effort to actually hash the whole thing out.
Has any other project here been particularly challenging?
Last year, I was working on improving the Add Negatives algorithm. That’s the most used 20-Minute Work Week alert. We are always trying to improve our algorithms so that the suggestions customers get are as relevant as possible. This one was really challenging for a few reasons. First, it’s extremely difficult to nail down a one-size-fits-all algorithm. For example, locations might be really good negatives for one customer, but they might not be great for another. And because a lot of our customers are small business owners, there’s not always an abundance of data to go off of.
So that project was very difficult. Right now, our engineering team is working on totally redoing the UI of that alert so that it uses the new algorithm, then also incorporates knowledge that only the customer knows. We’ll walk them through a process that helps them decide: do we really want a negative, or do we actually want a new keyword? Or do we actually want a new ad group? Whereas before you could only accept or reject what was suggested, now you can really analyze your search queries to select the best option—even if it’s not what our algorithm came up with.
Very cool. Switching gears a bit—has any one thing you’ve learned here particularly stuck with you?
I think I’ve learned to have more empathy for other departments here. For example, I learned Python here when one of the engineers taught a class about it. So, now I can read some of the code the engineers write, and I see just how much effort goes into my “easy” feature idea. I also have gotten the opportunity to shadow a bunch of Sales and Customer Success consulting calls, which helped me build empathy for all the work they do.
What’s your workspace aesthetic like? Minimalist? Homey? Neat?
It’s very neat. Like usually if the cleaning people move something just a little bit I can tell. Especially if they have the monitors out of the line…Everything has a place [laughs]! But yeah, I like to have some plants or some homey touches. I had this little eco ball, like a water sphere that had little shrimp in it. I killed them, though, so I don’t have anything right now. But in the future I hope to get them again.
You killed them accidentally or on purpose??
Accidentally! They were in the wrong sunshine when they died. It’s called an ecosphere, and it’s this entirely closed system that has like plants and shrimp. You can’t open it so it’s supposed to be self-sustaining…but obviously it was not.
You need to put your head down and get some work done asap. Do you have a go-to song?
When I’m at work and I want to focus, I like quieter acoustic music. But it has to have words; I can’t do classical music that would make me even more tired. I listen to this one playlist on Spotify over and over. It’s called “Calm Down.” I don’t even know what you would call the genre, but it definitely helps me decompress.
If WordStream announced a last-minute day off for tomorrow, what would you do with your suddenly free day?
OK—so I play Pokemon Go. You remember that? From like 2017? Well, I still play it. I have played it every day since it came out. I’m really into that. My husband plays it, too. It’s a game that involves a lot of walking around to different places so if I had the whole day off, it would be great to just walk around and do that.
What are the best spots to catch Pokemon around the city?
Probably the best spot is Castle Island, but Castle Island and Boston Common are both really great. The first week the game came out there were just like hundreds of people at Castle Island, and there was a Blastoise. I took a video on my phone—I was running in a crowd of a thousand people trying to get this thing.
If you didn’t work in marketing, what would you do?
I’m very into board games so I think I would do that. Maybe I could be like a board game designer or a board game tester. Or I have this idea where I would open a board game café. I also have this idea where I could go into schools and teach board games. Because it really develops a lot of different skills—problem solving, cooperation, etc. Two of my favorite games are Eldritch Horror and 7 Wonders. I’ve joined various meetup groups over the years. I also play board games with a group of WordStream people that meets every other week.
Anything else you do in your spare time?
I play volleyball, pretty poorly, in the Social Boston Sports leagues.
I also volunteer for the Crisis Text Line, which is basically a suicide crisis line but over text. I used to do it over the phone when I was in college, but I like it over text better. A lot of people in that kind of crisis feel more comfortable over text. It’s a lot of younger teenagers who don’t really know what other resources they have available.
How long have you been doing that?
For two years. It can be pretty intense. Sometimes I’ll take a break for a month or so. Especially over text, it can sometimes feel like you’re talking to the same person over and over again and they’re not getting better. But it definitely feels good when you can help someone. Like sometimes the texter will tell me it’s the first time they’ve told anyone about this. It’s rewarding to know you are helping in that way.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Advertising on Snapchat has proven to be highly lucrative and, honestly, a lot of fun. Our team of paid acquisition specialists are particularly well versed in the importance of locking down a swipe up in six seconds or less. Though we may have originally underestimated the value of Snapchat, as the fast-moving social media introduced advertising for SMBs through a self-serve platform, we got back onboard the Snap bandwagon.
The 18- to 24-year-old age group continues to be drawn to Snapchat, despite rumors that the platform was being vacated by influencers. In fact, 186 million people use Snapchat every day, creating 3 billion snaps per day. If you are trying to advertise to this younger demographic, start with Snapchat.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Snapchat ads, including how to:
Define your campaign goals
Choose a Snapchat ad format
Target your audience on Snapchat
Measure your success
Define Your Snapchat Campaign Goals
Like other social platforms, Snap has a few different advertising offerings to choose from. Depending on your goals and budget, Snapchat advertising provides different attachment types to effectively increase your ROI. Here’s a breakdown of each campaign goal that Snapchat can help you accomplish.
Brand Awareness and Video Views
This is the simplest way to advertise on Snapchat, because you’re only asking users to watch a video – an action they are already in the app to do. Keep it short and sweet! Insider tip: Snapchat advertisers report that ad fatigue is far higher on Snapchat than other social advertising platforms. To avoid this, make a few different versions of your video ads.
Web Views and Conversions
Pushing prospects to your website and down the sales funnel to a conversion through Snapchat advertising is probably the most popular way to advertising goal for this platform. If you are a Snapchat user, you’ve absolutely been served ads that encourage you to swipe up, read more, or check out the site.
Lead Generation
For those trying to expand the top of your marketing funnel, Snapchat advertising has you covered. You can create ads within Ad Manager to drive users to download, form fill, or register.
App Installs and Engagement
Snapchat advertising is uniquely targeted to mobile users in ways that Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others can relate to but never quite imitate. Use this to your advantage when building out a Snap advertising campaign! You know that if a user is opening, viewing, or swiping up on a snap, they are on their phone. Your prospects are inches of touchscreen away from the app store – or a tap away from a deep link placing them right where you want them in-app, but more on that in a minute.
Importantly, Snapchat advertising recently introduced down-funnel event tracking, from app installs to opens and conversions in-app. Use this with your third-party tracking platform to accurately measure the success of your campaigns.
Deep Linking in Snapchat Ads
Deep linking! A phenomenon that swept the mobile advertising world a few years ago, deep linking allows a user to land in a section of a mobile application. Snapchat advertising allows marketers to deep link from their ad into their app, bringing users exactly where you would want them. Be sure to test deep links against your run-of-the-mill links; you might be surprised at the results.
Brand Engagement
Almost half of college students on Snapchat would open a snap from a brand they didn’t know; almost three-quarters would open a snap from a brand they did know. Most of them are looking for discounts or promotions and are open to purchasing after viewing a product via Snapchat. The door to brand engagement is already wide open, your social media acquisition specialists just need to walk through it.
Catalog Sales
I’m not talking about your mother’s Land’s End in the mailbox – Snapchat advertising is bringing catalogs into a whole new age. With the release of Collection Ads, Snapchat now allows advertisers to drive catalog sales through a phone screen. Shoppers officially spend more time on their mobile devices than a desktop. Don’t fall behind the times!
Snapchat Ad Formats
When Snapchatters see advertising within the app, it feels seamless, which is a nod to their brand designers. Once you’ve determined your goals for Snapchat campaigns, you should consider which types of ads would work best to reach and engage your audience. The good news? Each of these formats is versatile! Pick your poison.
Snap Ads: The Basics
Snap Ads come in a variety of flavors, but what you should be thinking when you hear “Snap Ad” or “Top Snap” is your typical advertisement that prompts you to swipe up. Whether it is in a snap story or in the discover tab, the main point of action that snapchat advertising drives is a swipe. These live within stories and can drive users to a website, an app, a video, AR lens, or the app store.
These ads are 3-10 seconds in length, and make sure to follow Snapchat advertising restrictions when you set them up:
Upload a 1080 x 1920 px JPEG or PNG image, that will be converted into a 5 second video for a photo to video conversion
Remember that if you add an attachment to your Snap Ad, Snapchat will apply a call to action and caret at the bottom of the advertisement
Always include a brand name that matches the paying advertiser and a headline
Format for full screen and vertical
Make sure your ad is appropriate for viewers 13 years old and up
Story Ads
Snapchat Story Ads allow advertisers to place a branded tile in the Discover section of the Snapchat application. When users tap the tile, it opens into a collection of ads, anywhere between three and twenty placements. For this type of ad, Snapchat lays out the design for you, based on assets you deliver. You’ll need:
A headline, up to 34 characters
A brand name, up to 25 characters
Attachments, if you’re optimizing for a swipe up
And individual files for each Snap Ad within the story
Snapchat Story Ads are a branded content experience, not unlike playable or rewarded ads. Creating a narrative that will quickly engage users is your highest priority; don’t bother with an introduction! Dive right into it!
Snapchat Filters
I would bet that every Snapchat advertiser wishes that they could have designed the dog-face filter; imagine the reposts that drive monumental brand awareness. Though native to Snapchat, that filter is a fitting example of what advertisers should emulate when creating their own. These filters should represent your brand in a fun, relevant way. When designing and purchasing Snapchat filters, keep your customers in mind: Where will they will be using these? Why should they?
And remember these specs:
1080 by 2340-pixel image
300 KB or less
PNG with transparent background
210-pixel buffer zone at the top and bottom of the screen for larger phones
74 pixels for the send arrow
32 pixels for the “sponsored” designation
Portrait orientation
Should occupy less than 25% of the screen
Finally, KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Try not to fill the Snapchat filter with dense, deep graphics. Give the people what they want!
AR Lenses
Lenses are monetizing a classic Snapchat interaction. Users were first drawn to Snapchat because of the amusing (and flattering) filters at their disposal – who doesn’t want everyone to see them in perfect lighting?! This ad type allows brands to create interactive moments through augmented reality. Snapchatters can flip up sunglasses, stick out their dog tongue, shake their head to reveal a robot underneath, all with a brand logo stuck in the corner.
There are two types of lenses, the Face Lens and World Lens. Face Lenses feature innovative technology to recognize a user’s eyes, mouth, and head to transform into the characters your brand creates. A World Lens detects your location to map the environment around you. Users can use the rear-facing camera (aka the normal camera) to view their world through a different light.
While there are some logical restrictions on the content of your lens (don’t use profanity or change the user’s race or skin color, etc.), the world is your oyster when it comes to these Snapchat ads. Some best practices to keep in mind:
Lenses must feature your brand logo or name, but make sure not to obscure the face of the user. Snapchat recommends placing it in the top right or left corner.
Snapchat will add a “SPONSORED” tag to the ad, which will appear for two seconds before disappearing.
Collection Ads
In Snapchat’s most recent development of their programmatic offering, they rolled out Collection Ads! These ads allow advertisers to showcase a series of products. This ad type also gives users a fun, seamless way to shop and buy. If you haven’t seen a Collection Ad in real life yet, it is a basic Snapchat video ad with a ribbon of thumbnail-sized products at the bottom.
Collection Ads can be created based on a product catalog, allowing the products featured to be dynamic, or they can be created manually with uploaded tile images. Because this ad type has more pieces than just a simple Snap Ad, there are more requirements to fill out within Ads Manager. They’ll ask for unique links, calls to action, and swipe up URLs, and then Snap will apply the “AD” denotation.
Targeting through Snapchat Advertising
Now that you’ve defined your campaign goals and started to create your ads, you’ll want to set up audience targeting so that these ads appear for your ideal prospects. Like Facebook, you can reach Snapchat users based on a crazy number of categories. Unlike Facebook, Snapchat will tell you exactly where this data is coming from – whether it is Comscore, Nielsen, Placed, Datalogix, or any other data provider. This means that you can get super specific: you can target Fox News viewers, moms with kids in high school, recent visitors of an autobody shop, people with an interest in craft beer – there are countless possibilities.
For Filter and Lens ads, you’ll be prompted to select a location, but you can layer location onto other Snapchat ads, as well. Snapchat Ads Manager allows you to select a state, city, or zip code, or you can set a radius around a certain location.
Finally, like their social advertising counterparts, Snapchat allows marketers to create custom audiences and lookalikes. Lookalikes can be based on a file from your own CRM of prospects or website visitors. Custom audiences can target the same people – visitors or prospects – and retarget Snapchatters that have already engaged with your ads.
Measuring Success through Snapchat Advertising
While every platform advertises a suite of analytics, Snapchat’s might be my favorite. While staying on brand – everything is yellow! – they highlight segments that interact with your ads, even if you did not include those specific segments in the campaign. By increasing the relevance of your campaigns, you are improving the user experience and saving money. Basically, the platform helps you improve your campaign targeting and cut down costs. It’s a win-win-win for advertisers, Snapchat, and Snapchatters.
Pay attention to these stats! In the campaign highlighted above, Snapchat let us know that Shoppers, Liquor & Spirits Drinkers, and Shopping Mall Shoppers (how specific is that?!) were most likely to swipe up on the advertisement. By narrowing our scope to those specific segments – and cutting down on females and android users – we were able to decrease the cost-pe-swipe up by a couple of cents. Two pennies don’t seem like that big of a deal, but two pennies 600,000 times? That makes a dent.
Now, Go and Get Snapping!
All in all, Snapchat has a robust advertising platform, through which you can control your own destiny using their Ads Manager. If you’re a direct-to-consumer brands, give it a try. It’s cheap, fun, and maybe you’ll see success!
Pamela Lund has been a part of the online marketing industry for almost twenty years. She is well-known and respected for her knowledge and expertise in PPC, ecommerce marketing, and as a business efficiency consultant. We started off talking about PPC but then moved into how consultants can optimize their work day and be more efficient.
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