Snapchat will let brands measure its ads’ impact on sales, results against rivals

Snapchat is giving brands an apples-to-apples look at its ads’ bottom-line performance just before marketers map out their 2018 media budgets.

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One of the main reasons Snapchat isn’t yet a must-buy for advertisers is ad buyers’ inability to see how their Snapchat campaigns impact a business’s bottom line and stack up against ads running elsewhere. That’s about to change.

On Tuesday, Snapchat rolled out a program to allow third-party measurement firms to track its ads’ impact on a brand’s sales and to include that data in the dashboards that marketers use to evaluate where they’re spending their money and, of those places, where they’re getting the best bang for their bucks.

Snapchat’s marketing mix measurement program will work across all of the mobile app’s ad formats and will track campaigns’ return on ad spend, as well as sales lift. Those metrics help marketers evaluate how past campaigns impacted their businesses’ bottom lines and where they should spend their money in the future, and they are already available for ads on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

By making sales impact measurement available on Snapchat, marketers will get an apples-to-apples look at how their Snapchat investments fare by comparison. And it’s probably not a coincidence that Snapchat is rolling out this measurement just as marketers are about to head into the fall season, when they sit down with their media agencies to decide how to allocate their ad dollars for 2018.

The first marketing mix measurement firms to join Snapchat’s marketing mix measurement program are Analytic Partners, Marketing Management Analytics, Neustar and Nielsen.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Tim Peterson
Contributor
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

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