Growth Lessons from 2019: Snapchat Retargeting Works
Published: December 30, 2019
Author: Anna Mahon
In 2019, we decided to introduce Snapchat into our channel mix and saw very promising results from our retargeting initiatives. In comparison to other social platforms, Snapchat has a lot less competition and much cheaper CPMs. In Q4, we saw 68% lower CPMs on Snapchat than on Facebook ($8 vs. $25).
Cheap is obviously good, but did Snapchat actually work? Yes (and we’ll explain best practices in a bit).
Facebook Retargeting started off very strong in November and was the clear winner in driving the most revenue early in the holiday season. However, as we inched closer to December, the competition really picked up on Facebook, and Snapchat continued to dominate in terms of efficiency. Ultimately, although we spent 63% less on Snapchat for our retargeting initiatives because of the lower CPMs, Snapchat drove 88% more return than Facebook.
Best Practices for Snapchat Retargeting
Targeting: For our retargeting audiences, we focused mainly on people who had interacted with our website in the last 30 days but did not convert. I recommend breaking out your audiences into different buckets, such as Add-To-Cart and View Product. If you do break out the audiences, make sure to apply mutual exclusions so there is no audience overlap.
In terms of age targeting, Snapchat is known to skew towards the younger demographic. Pew Research Center data shows that 78% of Snapchat users are 18-24 years old. However, the target within Snapchat goes up to 50+; be sure to test all segments.
Bid Strategy: We set our campaigns bid strategy to Max Bid. Max bidding is recommended if you are just starting out on Snapchat; it helps incite competition in the auction to win the best audiences.
Creative: Snapchat has 3 different ad formats: story ads, single image/video ads, and collection ads. We saw the most success with the traditional single-image Snapchat ads within our Retargeting campaigns. We also tested video and collection ads and saw better success with these formats for our acquisition initiatives.
If you have an e-commerce client and have not yet introduced Snapchat into your channel mix, I highly recommend testing it out. Especially during the heightened competition in Q4, you will get more bang for your buck on Snapchat!
