5 new Snapchat retail features, just in time for Black Friday

Last week Snap Inc. announced some major advertising additions to their main app, of particular interest for retail and e-commerce businesses – just in time for the big holiday shopping season.

The year of performance marketing

Snap is in fact calling 2018 “the year of performance marketing”. Over the past year and a half, development within Snapchat has doubled down on new retail and e-commerce solutions. Better buying tools, improved first-party measurement and stronger capabilities for real-time targeting and optimization are just a few of these.

As the ‘most used app’ during and after shopping (for US general consumers), the time was ripe for Snapchat to start enabling retail and e-commerce advertisers to go to a new level. A survey has shown that Snapchat users are, on average, higher spending consumers – Snapchat households, in fact, spend 39% more annually in retail stores, compared to the US national average. The same study also suggested Snapchat users are less likely to care about price  and more likely to be impulsive buyers.

Crucial to note is that 36% of these Snapchat users can’t be reached on Instagram and 31% don’t spend time on Facebook. With new tools enabling you to reach shoppers on Snapchat, now is the time to address a highly-valuable portion of the market you may be missing.

Five recent additions for retailers

SHOPPABLE SNAP ADS

Also being referred to as Collection ads, this new Snapchat ad format allows brands to feature a collection of products within a single ad. Each product image can be tapped to reveal more product details. Once tapped, the ad can take the user through to the brand’s website to complete a purchase.

According to Snapchat, online retailer Wish.com earned a 17 percent higher engagement rate with the Shoppable Snap ads compared to standard Snap ads featuring the same products.

PRODUCT CATALOGS

Empowering the new Shoppable Snap ads format, by end of October 2018, Snapchat will enable ads to be automatically created with an advertiser’s product catalog. Similar to the way the catalog works in Facebook, the Snapchat product catalog will help retail and e-commerce advertisers scale their ad creation, and will be available for integration with 4 ad formats (Shoppable Snap ads, Snap ad + web view, Snap ad + deep link and Story ads).

A new advertising objective called ‘Catalog Sales’ has also been added, which will help advertisers optimize campaigns incorporating product feeds.

SNAP PIXEL

Adding new power to all your Snapchat advertising is the Snap Pixel, now out of beta and available to all Snapchat advertisers. The Snap Pixel ushers in whole host of new opportunities for advertising on Snapchat, making it possible for advertisers to track specific actions consumers take on their website rather than simply monitoring what page of the site they visited. Using the tracking data, advertisers can create more customized audiences for their campaigns going forward, and effectively retarget warm audiences they know are already in some way interested in their brand.

This announcement signals Snapchat is serious about providing solid performance marketing tools to advertisers, and further enables brands to cross-purpose Facebook advertising strategies, for example.

BUYING BY OBJECTIVE

Snap has also recently added a series of new campaign objectives, with performance goals in mind. With Catalog Sales joining Website Conversions at the ‘Conversion’ end of the marketing funnel, there are also a number of ‘Consideration’ phase performance objectives including Lead Gen, Drive Traffic to Website and App Installs.

Advertising objectives now available in Snapchat

The broadening of options in campaign objectives signals to advertisers that they can now engage (and re-engage) prospects at every level of the marketing funnel on Snapchat.

VISUAL SEARCH

Finally, in a rare partnership for Amazon, Snapchat announced it’s slowly rolling out a new visual product search feature. The tool is essentially about helping consumers go from seeing, to snapping, to sale.

Snapchatters will be able to use Snapchat’s camera to scan a physical object or barcode, which brings up a card showing that item and similar ones along with their title, price, thumbnail image, average review score and Prime availability. When they tap on one of those items, they’ll be sent to Amazon’s app or site to buy it.

Snapchat Visual Search promises to further reduce the gap between the physical and digital worlds, allowing consumers to be inspired, interact with the world around them, and purchase online – all within the same mobile experience.

Black Friday is coming!