If you have already gone through our Facebook and Instagram Ads guide, then this guide will be easier to digest as there are a lot of similarities between the two. We recommend reading that one first if you haven't yet.

🏗️ Structure and setup

Campaign structure

The Snapchat Ads platform follows the same format as Facebook and Instagram in terms of structure.

Each campaign can have multiple ad sets inside, and then each ad set can have multiple ads inside, but you can only have one campaign with one objective.

All the ad sets and ads inside this campaign will be optimized towards the objective you choose - in 90% of the cases - conversions.

In practice:

In this example above, I am advertising men wallets to an audience based in the UK, and the campaign objective is Conversions. Going down to the ad set level, I am advertising the black version of the wallet to Bristol men, 18 to 25, interested in Fashion.

The ad that I show to them is the creative 1 - it could be a photo or a video.

Of course, you can target other age groups, other cities or countries or other interests outside Fashion. Just make you keep it neat and organized to know what you are testing out.

As soon as we log in and try to set up our first Snap campaign, two options will pop up:

We recommend going for option B, where you have complete control over your campaigns, at least until you grasp the basics of Snap advertising.

Campaign Objective

Snapchat offers a little more in terms of objectives, but unless you are looking for something specific or trying to create brand awareness, conversions is still the way to go.

Facebook (and Instagram) has six campaign objectives, as seen below:

We will focus on the website conversions objective. If you are looking for conversions (purchases, sign up, etc.), we strongly advise you to stick to this objective. From our experience, this works better.

We tried different objectives and ran many A/B Tests with other settings - eventually, we came back to this objective as this works the best so far.

Now is the time to install the Snapchat Pixel. Follow this link for guidance.

There is a Daily Spend Cap and a Lifetime Spend Cap when we set our campaign.

We can set a maximum daily spend or a maximum lifetime spend. Still, at least in this initial phase, we will monitor our ads constantly (every three-four days), and we are going to run small budgets, so there is no need for this.

Ad Formats and Placements

On Snapchat, we have the following ad formats:

The following placements are available:

We recommend not touching the placement for your ads - to start with - Automatic Placements - is the way to move forward.

Snapchat effectively finds the optimal placement for your ads and allocates the budget accordingly. However, if you want to test this out, we recommend separating ad sets and running an A/B test to see which performs better.

More ad set level settings

Remember, you should always secure your Snapchat account before engaging in any activity on it. We decided to group the rest of the settings ad the Ad Set level.

Location

As simple as it sounds. Advertising in the UK? Mention that. Targeting Dallas, Texas? Let Snapchat know.

Demographics

Age

Unless your product is for a specific age group, we recommend going with 18-50, so quite broad. Unfortunately, the age group, 13-18, does not have much buying power; we can leave it on the side for now.

If you are 100% sure that your product is for a specific age group, then sure, you can go ahead and select that one only. However, Snapchat itself is very good at figuring this out, so it’s still ok to go with broad (18-50) in this case too.

Gender

Unless you are selling something specific to men or women, go with both.

Language

Unless you target “Spanish” speakers or “Italian” or similar, leave this option blank. If you advertise in Tier-1 countries (US, UK, AU, CA), leave this on default.

Audiences

Predefined Audiences → this is the Interests based audience

Follow the same process learned for Facebook Ads. Brainstorm interests related to your product or browse the Snapchat available interests to see which one matches your product.

Remember - there is no right or wrong here. However, make sure you’re not going too far away.

Custom Audiences → the Lookalikes

The process of creating Lookalike audiences is similar to the Facebook one. Just head over to ads.snapchat.com → Log In → Manage Ads → Audiences → New Audience

Unless you want to target iPhone owners, Samsung owners, IOS or Android users, leave this default.

It’s one setting that is pretty specific to your advertising product. For example, for an e-commerce store owner selling black leather wallets, it does not matter if the audience uses Android or IOS.

If you have a mobile app, you might want to understand Android acquisition versus IOS acquisition costs.

Delivery

Set your budget here. Go with a daily budget here, and keep an eye out to see the performance and start immediately.

Bid

Ad Level

What you can set up here:

Remember: keep a solid structure and organize your ads with care. It will help you understand what works and what does not for you. We talked more about this in the Facebook Ads guide.

Image and video size - 1080x1920

This is the standard size for the Snapchat creative.

Head over here to learn more about which creatives work best.

🔨 Optimizing your ads

In this part, we will talk about optimizing your campaigns to success.

The optimizing process is similar to the one on Facebook Ads, so if you already took time to digest that guide and maybe even launch a campaign, theoretically, you should be good to go for Snapchat as well.

Short intro on Campaign Objectives

Snapchat offers a few more objectives compared with Facebook and Instagram.

However, the architecture behind the Social Media Advertising platforms, or how they work behind the scenes, is similar.

What is the objective we optimize for?

Different campaign objectives will require us to look at different metrics to evaluate performance.

As of August 2022, Snapchat groups its advertising campaign options into three categories:

What metrics to look at and where?

To understand how to optimize our ads for cheaper conversions, we need to have a look at the following metrics:

If you don't know what these metrics mean, please read our acronym guide.

We discussed this in the second part of the Facebook ads guide, and it applies here too. The North Star we are looking for is the cost per purchase. And then purchases.

As a business owner or an advertiser, you must know how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer. This is strongly tied to the LTV if you're running a SaaS, COGS if you are running e-commerce and more; it depends on your business model and particularities.

Your target CPA is the same if you run ads on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter or YouTube.

It does not change anything. If your target CPA is $40, you will experiment with different platforms and settings until you manage to have this under control.

Below, we're shortly running through the other metrics:

Impressions - depends on the budget you are running ads with; somewhere between 1.000 to 30.000 impressions should be enough to decide if this ad or ad set is worth investing in.

Reach - goes hand in hand with the above; they will always be close numbers.

Swipe-up Rate - this will show you how good is your creative or if you are advertising to the right people. If it's small, and I consider small, whatever is under 0.5, then go back to the creative or start looking more into audiences.

However, something to mention here: if ads are converting at a good CPA, you do get a decent amount of purchases, and the swipe-up rate is low; again, don't stress it out. Let it run as long as the CPA is making sense for you. If they don't convert, and this metric is low, it might be time to look more at the creative and the audience.

eCPM and eCPSU - understand more about your audience

ABO vs Single Ads Optimization

The structure is the same as Facebook and Instagram, except for one setting: Snapchat does not have a CBO to set a campaign budget and then let the algorithm decide which ad set is getting the results you want.

You can set a daily spend cap or a lifetime spend cap; this will give you more control over your campaigns, but it's not quite a CBO optimization like we have seen on Facebook and Instagram.

ABO and Single Ads Optimizations

The same principles apply over here too. An ABO campaign will distribute the budget across your ads, and the ones picking up will get more budget; simple as that.

Turn off the ads that are not performing and add more instead.

The single ads optimizations will give you complete control over your ads: launch them individually, one per ad set, provide them with time and apply the same rule: allocate more budget for the ads that are performing and the ones that are not performing, shut them down.

You have to try them out as an advertiser to see which structure works for your product or business.

Notes

If you have already worked your way through the Facebook Ads Guide, you already know how to run Snapchat Ads. The structure is very similar, the objectives are the same, and you already know what metrics to look at for success.

Similar rules apply: keep a concise structure of your campaigns, know what you're testing and A/B test different settings and creative. Lastly, we strongly advise you to spend some time in the Snapchat Ads Manager, get used to it, be curious and go beyond what we teach you over here.

Another essential bit we want to mention: research the Snapchat audience. Overall, this audience is slightly different from the one on Facebook or Instagram, is younger, and the shopping behaviours are different.

Snapchat also offers guidance for advertisers; check out these guides below: