Snap Inc.’s newest ad tool aims to help retailers understand whether their ads on Snapchat are driving consumers into their stores.
The tool, called Snap to Store, enables retailers and brands to create and measure the offline impact of Snapchat ads.
Snap to Store’s analytics show retailers:
- Visitation, which is the shoppers who saw the merchant’s ads, as well as how many of their shoppers are Snapchat users.
- Lift, which compares Snapchat users who have seen the ad with a control group that hasn’t seen the ad to determine whether the ad drove consumers into the merchant’s store.
- Aggregated insights, which breaks down shoppers by gender and age. Retailers can further break down those shoppers by examining age buckets within each gender, state, region and ad product type.
Retailers can use the tool to track the marginal increase in foot traffic from a Snapchat ad campaign, engage customers who have used Snapchat at one of their stores and examine aggregated demographic information about the consumers who have used the app in their stores.
Snap is hardly alone among digital advertising platforms in seeking to help retailers and other advertisers bridge the divide between digital ads and offline sales. Facebook Inc., Google and others have been rolling out a number of omnichannel tools over the past few years to help retailers understand how digital ads influence offline sales, which despite e-commerce’s rapid growth, still make up roughly 88.3% of U.S. retail sales of items that are often bought online, according to Internet Retailer’s analysis of U.S. Commerce Department data.
Snap is betting that its ads will appeal to advertisers thanks in part to its robust targeting tools.
The platform offers 10 targeting tools, many of which are similar to those offered by Facebook and other social networks. The tools include the ability to present shoppers with ads based on their offline purchases, on the content they’ve viewed on Snapchat, on non-Snapchat actions they’ve taken on a retailer’s site, as well as on users’ similarities with other Snapchat users. Retailers can also target based on age, gender, location, device carrier and context.
Snap’s Snap to Store rollout comes the same week Facebook announced that Instagram Stories, its clone of Snapchat’s popular Stories format, has more than 200 million daily users, up from 150 million in January. Snapchat has 161 million daily active users.
[infogram id=”instagram_stories_and_snapchat” prefix=”Csk” format=”interactive” title=”Instagram Stories and Snapchat users”]