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An Overview of Snapchat Ad Manager

In terms of the basic features and the structure of the ad manager, you have to sign up for the business account. It's free. Anyone can do it. You can do it from your personal Snapchat account. Or you can go to snapchat.com and go to ads. You will be offered to include your business details. It's all very straight forward. It's not complicated. You just provide your details and then you tap get started. Snapchat ad manager is available both on desktop and on mobile. However, the mobile version has more restricted features. So if you're starting out I would recommend that you go and do it on the desktop and you develop and launch the ads there, but you can monitor the performance on the mobile version on the go if you wish. So this is how it looks when you are just starting out, and you can see that it's a minimalistic design so that you would not be distracted by lots of things. So you see that you can tap on the top left corner and access additional features, and they are hidden so th...

at they would not be confusing you from the very beginning. You will see that there are no campaigns, so you simply start create a campaign. And I think that Snapchat really makes it easy for you when you're a first-time user because it literally walks you through. You will not miss a step because you have to follow the steps that they are taking you through. So there are two ways to create Snapchat ads. One is quick and easy and another one is advanced. So if you are super new to the platform, if you just want to try it out, and if you do not have a team or have minimal experience in creating ads I would recommend that you go for the quick and easy ad setup. If you have the team of people or person who's running and is experienced in creating ad sets and ads and knows how to test different types of ads and different visuals and call to actions, then you need to use the advance create. We'll go through both elements. So you will have a feel for both steps within both processes. So we've briefly spoken about this just now. So Top Snap Only, no attachment. It could be a video or a GIF or a still. It can be anything really, as long as you are promoting that content within that one piece. So you can use that if you want to promote a particular short video on Snapchat. You can have a long video, so to that first frame you can attach a call to action, and you can attach a longer video, so that video can be up to 10 minutes long. And that basically, you tease the person with the ad, and then they're watching the longer video where you can give more details about your product. Web View. Again, you attach a web page, whether it's a product page or a signup page or whatever it is, and you can, with the Snapchat technology, you can preload that page so it loads real fast. And the thing is that it loads within the Snapchat app. It does not open a new browser. Nothing happens. It just, the new page is popping up in the Snapchat app. Meaning that the person is not leaving the platform, so it's really easy for someone to make a purchase on your website within the Snapchat app without making any additional actions. Deep Link is good for if you are, again, attaching, driving your audience to a specific piece of content within your website or within your app. App Install is the type of ad when you are specifically driving people to install your app if they are not a user. And in this case the ad will launch either an Android Google Play store or Apple store. App store where the user can download the app. And we'll see a few examples later. And the Camera Filter, so that delivers filtered ads to the audience who is more likely to interact with them. So once you have selected the type of the ad from this list that is presented to you, you will be taken to this page where you can add information to design, like the basics to design your ad. The name of your ad will appear just for you. Shareable is important because, you can load as an existing creative or you can work with it here. Like all these items are important, just go through them one by one. While you are adding the information on the right-hand side you will be able to see how your add is looking like. And then shareable option is important because if a user loves your ad, and if they wanted to forward it to their friend, they will be able to do it if this function is on. If it's off then they will not be able to share your ad. Call to action is important and Snapchat offers you a lot of options. So, as you can see, they are pretty specific and detailed. And you can choose from any of those. That's for a specific ad type that you have selected. So if you have selected App Installs, the call to action will be reflective of that choice. And then you can create a new creative for your ad or you can load an existing creative. Again, if you are just starting out you can use the Snapchat creator. And I will show you in a second how it works. If you want more control over it then you can hire someone to create that ad for you. And again, we will go through the steps of what the ad should look like. So this is how a creative option looks like. So if you tap create, you will be taken to this page. You can add your photos, your videos. You can add text. You can add different shapes. And also, these little icons over here, they're little tags which can control what happens to the frame at that particular second. So whether you want your second picture to turn and fly at the person kind of, or if you want your text to expand, or if you want an element of the ad to rotate, you can control that in these tags. If you've never added to any video or had not worked with editing software, you might find it a little overwhelming. In that case if you are more comfortable in working with other editing platforms to create your ad, this is fine, and again, you can upload your creative. But here you can have your library and import stuff. You can add your logo. Basically that's the place where you can create your ad. And also, Snapchat offers you to save your templates as well. So if you wanted to create a few templates for your ads that will have very specific structure, you can do that in the creative manager. When you have created your ad and you are ready to publish it you have this preview. And then you are going back to targeting. So this option down here, which says allow preloading, it's really important because if you are, for example, adding a page, a URL, Snapchat will preload it on the backend so that the user is served this page much faster, which is good considering, especially if you have like a heavier website, and you should always look at the loading time. And like two to three seconds is like a lot of time. So it really should load fast. But this helps you to improve the loading speed. And this is the most exciting part. Even with the quick and easy create you have a lot of control over whom you are serving the ad to. So these are some basics that you can look at. And then if you tap show more you will see additional options. So what we have here is that you can target by location. That's not new to if you're using ads in most of the platforms. You can choose the location of the people whom you want to serve the ad to. However, as you can see here, you can even use a post code. Which is quite interesting because, for example, in the United Kingdom a post code is a very specific address. So it's like a building. And in America it's more of a block, you know, kind of wider area. But it's good because if you want to target the state of California you don't have to type all the towns and cities here. You can just select a state. So it already starts with pretty robust targeting in terms of the location and location categories. And then you can include certain areas. But if you want to exclude particular locations, maybe where your product is not available, then you can do that in the Snapchat ad manager. So you have a lot of control. You may choose to serve your ad to the entire population of the United States, for example, or another country for that matter. Just be aware of the consequences and the costs, because the more narrow you go with your audience, especially if you know, if you have a good profile of your customer base, the better your results will be because they will be more relevant. The wider you go the wider the network is, so you are more likely to reach more people, and they kind of self select themselves, so you can catch additional audiences through that. But it might be that you will be spending much more money to find that right audience. You can choose by languages. Again, it's good if you are serving a particular piece of content within your app or a particular version of your website or product available in this particular country, a collaboration with a local influencer, so you name it but if you need language targeting you can do that. And then this is the most interesting part in the targeting. On Snapchat the demographics are very advanced. And you can target people by demographics and by interests. So if we are looking at demographics, these are just some of the examples I screenshot for you. So presence of a child is one thing. Occupation, whether people are married, whether they're moms, whether they're working, whether they're not working. These are all things that are covered. And these are some more examples. Household income, education, life event, and again, you can access some of those categories on Facebook ads, for example, as well, or Instagram ads for that matter. But Snapchat really dives in into smaller categories. And you can literally pick the life event the person's experiencing. So if you are targeting people who are about to go to college you can do that. If you want them to have a certain income then you can do that. And so on. So you just need to go and play and see the entire list of the demographic targeting because it's very robust. Interests is another thing, which is really interesting. Their lifestyles, their shopping habits, and then there are metrics for viewers and visitors of the stores. So some of these metrics I screenshot here. So these are lifestyles of Snapchat audiences, and you will see that. On the left it shows you a lifestyle and on the right it shows you a Snapchat tag. So you can easily go and pick the audience. You can choose burger lovers if that's maybe you're serving a particular course on making burgers or items that you can prepare burgers with or a sauce that they should be asking in the restaurant or maybe would buy for home. So you can do that. So you should think about lifestyles as the type of person that is more likely to buy your product or service and target them through the lifestyles. And the thing you see on the right is the source of that data. So Snapchat has business partners or companies that they acquired for the purpose of having better data on the user base. So for example, Datalogix is one of the companies that has data on customers and you can see the types of lifestyle categories that they are offering. Comscore offers data on people who are viewing content, like whether they view a particular type of content on TV or go to the cinema. So it can be like drama, comedy, whatever. Or the places they visit. So PlaceIQ was acquired by Snapchat and this helps you like if you have a brick and mortar store people who are more likely to visit banks, they are more likely to be interested in an app that helps them to manage their finances. So it's really about thinking what are those behaviors and lifestyles that can complement your business or be an extension of your business that you can tap into. And I think these are really cool because basically as long as you know who your customer is and hopefully when you spend money on ads you actually have done your homework and you'll know whom you are delivering your product to, these are really useful for very precise targeting. And then once you've selected those targeting options you are taken to the summary page where you can set a daily budget. You can decide when the campaign starts and ends, and your bid goal. It's very similar to Facebook and Instagram ads, so you bid for the placement of the ad in one of those places that we saw where Snapchat ads are placed, and you're competing with other companies. If less companies are competing for that, your bid is lower. And again, Snapchat is showing you what the suggested bid is, and you can choose higher amount and get more changes to get featured, get that ad posted, or lower. And you can pay for impressions or for actual action and swipe ups. And then they give you a summary. So, you have everything you need in one place, and the ad will be approved by the team, by the Snapchat team, as we know, it's not always perfect, and that some bad ads can come through, which is not good for the users, but hopefully your ad is fine, and your ad is approved quickly and it starts running.