When Will Snapchat Drive Sales?

The potential of making money on Snapchat is real: the app is FULL of millennials and the perfect platform to use for brand awareness right now. During the Super Bowl, several larger companies laid down more than $1 million to have their ads within the Live SB stories. Besides being super and ridiculously expensive, the current problem is that there is no clear path for a user to buy anything from the site or to link offsite to a commerce platform, making the ROI virtually unknown.

This strategy may be changing in the second or third quarter of this year, as Snapchat may allow brands to offer direct shopping within the platform itself.

If you’re still not sold on Snapchat, take a look at the current statistics, which are pretty incredible:

Live Stories (snaps based around news events) can bring in tens of millions of views.

Snapchat Discover has users in the millions each day.

8 billion videos are watched daily – which rivals Facebook, which has at least 10 times the user base.

41% of the ’35 and under’ crowd spends time on Snapchat every day.

The potential for brand ads to interact with these users is full of creative possibility, more than the standard product post or video campaign. A brand can design a lens (a feature where a user can use their face with weird filters), or create a customized ad (a feature where a user can take a snap of a page and fill in blank spaces with color or emojis) that they can then share with friends. And for the data conscious, Snapchat finally will be providing demographic information through Nielsen which is a great first step to prove to companies that spending big bucks is worth it.

PMG will be following up on the changes within Snapchat as they happen, so that we can give the latest news to our clients looking to get into and succeed in this space!

Relevant articles:

Bloomberg Business, “How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds” by Max Chafkin & Sarah Frier

Ad Week, “Can Snapchat Become an E-Commerce Platform?” by Justin Lafferty