As we look ahead to the holidays, retail, e-commerce, and other direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are fine-tuning their plans and pursuing every possible opportunity to reach consumers. While the vast majority of social media ad budgets are allocated towards Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat is looking to carve out elbow room for itself with a new update: Dynamic Ads, a feature that automatically creates and updates product ads to run for you within the app.
Here’s a breakdown of its key benefits and how you can begin to implement them into your strategy:
Enhanced creative quality
Utilizing the product images and information you upload, Snap’s Dynamic Ads will create customized, built-in templates for you. As a result, you can easily create variations of different Snap ads in vertical view format.
“Snapchat Dynamic Ads now allow brands to create real-time optimized mobile ads quickly and at scale, with products showcased in visually-appealing templates that feel native to the app,” said Snap Group Product Marketing Manager of Direct Response Kathleen Gambarelli.
Increased return on effort
To avoid having your ads feel generic, you can use the same product image across five different template styles as depicted below.
In this way, you can spice up your offering and showcase the product in a different way with minimal added effort and no manual work needed. What this ultimately boils down to is more time and resources freed up to put behind the growth of your business and less on designing.
Greater ad relevance
An important and ever-present question plaguing marketers today is how can I remain relevant in an age of information abundance and younger audiences?
With Snap’s newest update, you can sync a product catalog, identify which audience you want to prospect or re-engage, and then pass the baton off to the platform to deliver the ad in real-time. In addition, as changes to the product occur such as pricing or stock availability, ads will automatically adjust accordingly. The big draw here is that you can run ‘always-on’ campaigns giving you the ability to continuously tailor the user shopping experience based on their interests.
If your ads are continuing to drive great results, you have the option to maintain your data flow and Snap will run the ad with the latest information so you don’t have to continue to update your listings. As the saying goes, sometimes the approach of not fixing what isn’t broken is the simplest and most effective. Bare in mind however, as a best practice you should aim to always have your finger on the pulse of the conversation versus setting and forgetting.
Success stories
Brands that have already tested the product include online fashion retailer Princess Polly Clothing and accessories brand, Vitality. The former reported that dynamic ads drove a 66 percent increase in CPP and a 171 percent boost to ROI.
Vitality described its ability to reuse existing product feeds to create high-quality full-screen ads with the new update. Through these efforts, the company saw a 21 percent increase in cost per purchase and a 29 percent increase in return on ad spend.
“Although it’s early, we’re seeing very promising results — our Dynamic Ads campaigns are driving a 66 percent decrease in Cost Per Purchase and a 286 percent increase in ROAS compared to our 2019 re-engagement Initiative running simultaneously,” reported Chris Ratterman, Founder & CEO at Shady Rays and another beta test partner.
Finally, The Ridge Wallet, the minimalist wallet company, saw that dynamic ads drove a 66 percent increase in CPP and a 171 percent boost to ROI.
A move to add depth to its offering to better serve advertisers in the retailer and DTC space is invaluable and comes during a time where other channels are quickly becoming saturated. Not to mention, many brands are growing reliant on platforms like Snapchat in order to improve how they cater to a younger audience base of Millenials and Gen Z and harness their buying power through creativity, convenience and authenticity.
“More than 75 percent of the 13-34-year-old U.S. population is active on Snapchat, and daily Snapchat users open the app over 20 times each day, offering brands major opportunities to reach the right person with the right message at the right time,” said Gambarelli.
For additional insights to help prepare your brand, download the replay of our holiday e-commerce webinar hosted in partnership with MikMak earlier this fall.
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