Audiences & Ad Types for Boosting Snapchat Sales
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Fitness Apparel Brand
A leading fitness apparel brand began their legacy with a goal to unite customers in their niche community. Today, they globally produce apparel that serves to help everyone feel their best, all while providing a space that provides support for their personal lifestyle and fitness goals.
The Challenge
This leading fitness apparel retailer knew that their presence on various social media platforms helped them reach their consumers and authentically tell their brand story. They promoted their best sellers and essential products along with layering on intermittent sale campaigns when needed. However, they needed a plan to talk to their existing target audiences in new ways and more effectively increase Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
The Strategy
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Rise identified the highest impact opportunities by reviewing the brand’s paid social advertising portfolio across platforms. Knowing that Snapchat has a unique audience and ad types with superior social commerce capabilities, we focused on Snapchat as the best place to start. In order to outline a recommended Snapchat media plan, we started with the data.
Our team ran an audit on the existing Snapchat campaign structures, audience targeting, and creative strategy. We broke that down into two phases — Refresh and Expand — beginning each phase by defining the audiences and then incorporating ad types and creative.
Phase 1: Refresh
AUDIENCES
Insight: To determine the largest audience pools, and which audiences should continue to be targeted, we analyzed historical audience data looking at engagement and ROAS. We found that remarketing from three specific audiences were the most successful: client provided CRM lists (“CRM lists”), users who viewed the retailer’s Snapchat content (“view content”), and those who added a product to their carts, but had not yet purchased (“add to cart”).
Action: By determining the audiences that had the highest incremental opportunity, we launched a Snapchat refresh with a focus on remarketing, specifically from those high value audiences — CRM lists, View Content, and Add to Cart.
AD TYPES
Insight 1: We reviewed the top ad types for Pinterest and Meta and found that dynamic ads featuring products on sale saw the highest return.
Action 1: We applied these learnings and prioritized Product Catalog Ads to run on Snapchat during relevant sale dates, alongside evergreen campaigns. The Catalog Sale ads supplemented the evergreen campaigns with Conversion objectives that were live on an ongoing basis and featured best selling products.
Insight 2: We combined efforts with our partners at Snapchat to explore what additional kinds of ads and content were ideal to capture the attention of ideal users for this retailer.
Action 2: This collaboration confirmed we needed to add three ad types to our initial launch:
Snap Ad
Story Ad
Collection Ad
Phase 2: Expand
AUDIENCES
Insight: With the initial rollout successfully covering remarketing tactics, the campaigns had not yet reached economies of scale.
Action 1: It was time to test into prospecting. First, we added different prospecting audiences to the sale campaigns, including interest based and CRM lookalikes. They proved effective there and were quickly added to the evergreen campaigns as well.
Action 2: There was one more in-platform remarketing tactic that generally excelled on Snapchat, the Video Views audience. This top of funnel audience reaches users who have previously viewed the brand’s videos on Snapchat, signaling a higher intent to purchase a product.
AD TYPES
Insight: Relative to our ROAS goals and the other ad types, Snap ads were performing below expectation, especially for sale campaigns.
Action: We discontinued Snap ads for sale campaigns, and kept a minimal presence of them on the evergreen campaigns. This intentionally allowed us to keep ad type diversity and reach people in different placements, while also putting extra focus on the top performing ad types: Story and Collection ads.
The Result
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Plus… through our analysis and iterative strategy, Snapchat became one of the top performing social media platforms!