Snap measurement partner: All about Snapchat and measuring Snap Ads with Singular

Over the last several months, we’ve heard from many clients about their interest in implementing Snapchat app install ad campaigns. The good news for you: Singular is a Snap measurement partner.

This post provides a bit of background information on the platform and its ad products, and outlines how Singular clients can leverage our combined attribution and analytics toolsets to measure and optimize Snapchat campaigns.

A massive mobile platform

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about the meteoric rise of this powerful mobile platform. Some eye-popping stats:

• More than 238 million daily active users (DAUs)
• More than 180 million who engage with augmented reality on Snapchat
• An average of 30+ minutes in the Snapchat app per user per day
• Over 60% of users create Snaps with the Snapchat camera every day
• 18 billion daily view views (!!)

The Snapchat audience has celebrated strength among millennials. But its reach and footprint have grown rapidly in other audience segments as well, and the social media giant offers significant reach into many major audience cohorts globally. As a Snap measurement partner, Singular can help you access this audience.

Snapchatters love the platform, spending more than 30 minutes per day on average posting and viewing content. With that kind of reach and engagement, it’s only natural that many advertisers are looking to add the platform to their acquisition programs.

Digital analysis shows that Snapchat has a variety of unique characteristics that heighten user engagement and keep people coming back again and again throughout the day. That’s making brands more interested in working with this major mobile player and leveraging its digital advertising products.

What’s unique about Snapchat?

For those that aren’t super familiar with Snapchat, you should really take a look, as it is different in a variety of respects from other social platforms. At its core, this platform is built around content: vertical videos and images, not text. Images and videos are the center of virtually every Snapchat screen. It is also a mobile-centric experience, relying on the uber portability of smartphones AND their mobile cameras to gather content, and their vertical phone screens to view it.

From the beginning, Snapchat created a personality and set of tools that seem to have made millions of people more people comfortable with frequently creating content. Snapchat constantly makes it clear that authenticity and timeliness are what matters, not necessarily million-dollar production values.

That focus on organic experience is part of the reason why users have been so quick to adopt Snapchat and happily devote big blocks of their time to Snapchat. For most platforms, the percentage of content creators versus content consumers is relatively small. (Think YouTube for an extreme example.)

But on Snapchat, almost everyone is a creator.

6 in 10 Snapchat users create content every day.

Snapchat also enables users to set specific privacy and sharing parameters for each piece of content they produce. Users can create and share content with individual friends, as part of a “user story,” or they can submit content to “Our Stories” which lets Snapchatters build community narratives together (think first day of college, or Coachella). These temporary experiences play off what is arguably Snapchat’s most powerful trait: authenticity.

Snapchat attracts a lean-forward, mobile-centric, youth audience coveted by many types of apps.

Snap measurement partner: app marketers are leveraging Snapchat

With its broad, youthful demos and massive reach, Snapchat is fast becoming a popular way for app marketers to quickly grow install counts.

For many of our marketer clients, Snapchat is interesting as a way of both growing scale and diversifying install streams – something many marketers are interested in doing as the industry consolidates to fewer, larger players. With Snapchat, companies get access to a massive, deeply engaged audience.

Advertising products

Snapchat offers a full-screen ad format for app install campaigns. Its foundation is a Snap Ad; an up to 10-second full-screen vertical video unit. After seeing the video, those Snapchatters interested in learning more or downloading the app can swipe up for options. Here a brand can connect the user to a longer-form video, other local content, or directly to one of the app stores to download. The introduction of goal-based bidding for install ads further enhances the unit by allowing app advertisers to optimize towards installs.

Currently, advertisers can buy directly from the Snapchat company sales team, through a self-serve ad manager, or field campaigns through one of Snapchat’s growing number of Snapchat Partners.

Here is an example of a Snapchat video ad: