Snapchat has confirmed its dynamic ads offering is now available worldwide, after previously being in open beta in the US.
“The coronavirus has accelerated the need for businesses to look at their digital sales channels and encouraged them to be more innovative in how they do that. Since we opened up beta-testing, I was impressed at the number of businesses that wanted to get involved—far above what we expected—which really shows the appetite for brands to get on board with ecommerce.” – Ed Couchman, Snapchat U.K. General Manager
Snap had been beta testing in the UK with brands like Adidas, Topshop and Farfetch, alongside some agency partnerships with 4C, Smartly.io and Brainlabs.
What Are Dynamic Ads?
Already available for many years on Google and Facebook, dynamic ads are a personalized display unit. They are powered by an uploaded product feed, allowing ads to show products to users based on the criteria the media buyer chooses.
Most commonly it’s used in retargeting, showing users products they viewed but didn’t purchase.
Benefits of Snap’s Dynamic Ads
One of the tougher parts in platforms like Snap and TikTok is the user generated videos have a very specific style.
Ads generally perform better when they look native to the platform they run on, but this can create more work for advertisers. Instead of being able to make a version or two of a video and run it on all platforms, they wind up making tweaks and amendments for each one.
Snap offers templates to help save time for advertisers in making their products easier to showcase in a way that looks native. There are five templates available to advertisers:
Here is an example of what they look like with a product populated:
Adidas’ test in Europe elicited enthusiastic feedback from their media team on the results:
“We’re excited to beta test Snapchat’s Dynamic Ads in the U.K., Germany, France and the Netherlands. Within weeks we saw a 52% growth in ROAS (return on advertising spend) and we have subsequently grown our investment.” – Rob Seidu, Sr. Director of Media Activation, Europe
How Dynamic Ads Work
There are two requirements to get Snapchat Dynamic Ads up and running: their tracking pixel and a product catalog.
The pixel is the tracking mechanism on a website that feeds behavior and visit information back to Snapchat so it recognizes when those users are later on the platforms. These events must match to at least 1,000 Snapchat users in order to activate dynamic ads.
The common thread that lets Snap know what product to show is passed via the item_id parameter. This must be present and fed back to Snapchat for Page Views, View Content, Add to Cart, and Purchase actions.
The item_id parameter is then matched to the product catalog a brand uploads so the ad unit will pull the correct photo and pricing.
Product catalogs can be uploaded manually, or as a scheduled data fetch automatically.
Once connected, brands can create Product Sets to group and filter products that they want to be eligible to show:
Product Sets will then populate and can then be selected when the ad set is created.
The full documentation on dynamic ads can be found here.
Images courtesy of Snapchat
