Snapchat promises to focus on proving ad effectiveness
The social platform says it wants to “enhance” its ad offering, develop its programmatic tools and prove the effectiveness of its advertising.
Snapchat believes it still has a job to do convincing brands of its value, as it looks to hone in on the effectiveness of its ads.
The brand revealed its latest set of results yesterday (10 August), which showed that losses at its parent company Snap Inc nearly quadrupled in the second quarter. Snap lost $443m despite revenues rising 153% to $182m. That was below analyst expectations.
Growth also slowed, with Snapchat adding 7.3 million new users in the quarter, below the 8 million expected. It now has 173 million daily active users.
Despite the figures, the company’s chief strategy officer Imran Khan remained upbeat and insisted it had made “great progress” monetising the platform.
Advertising revenue increased 146% year on year and 25% quarter over quarter. Snapchat claims to have over 69 million daily active users in the US and Canada, which Khan said “are two of the most monetisable markets in the world”. Together these two countries currently represent half of its global mobile advertising spend.
Nevertheless, the business believes it still has “a lot more room to grow”, and has set itself three key priorities to achieve this. First, Snapchat wants to improve its ad offering and then create “more efficient” tools for advertisers.
READ MORE: Snapchat must prove to marketers it has mass appeal
Snapchat will predominantly look to achieve this by further developing its programmatic capabilities. Earlier in the year it launched a self-service feature for brands to programmatically buy ads, which it now hopes to expand on and in turn will attract smaller brands to the platform.
“Some 60% of Snap ad impressions are now being delivered programmatically, more than double from last quarter. Because we’re still in early stages of monetisation we’re focused on onboarding as many advertisers as possible,” he said.
“Increasing automation on our apps platform is driving better ROI for our advertisers. Our focus in coming months will be making it even easier for advertisers to find exactly what they are looking for on our self-service platform.”
Its third area of focus is proving the effectiveness of its advertising, as advertisers are still eager to “measure the effectiveness of their digital spending in the real world”.
In June it announced the acquisition of location-based analytics and ad measurement company Placed. With Placed it hopes to measure store visits and offline purchases to prove digital ads are driving “real value” for advertisers.
“We’re committed to working with the best third-party measurement companies to provide transparency to our advertisers,” Khan added.
