Dive Brief:
- In a welcome change for Snapchat’s Discover partners, the messaging app has altered a Discover portal policy and now allows its publisher partners to link content outside of the platform such as via tweets or Facebook posts.
- Both Google and Apple have previously promoted mobile app deep-linking as a way to help index the mobile web as well as help marketers with retargeting across apps and devices.
- Snapchat also recently offered marketers a limited targeted ability around Discover content with “audience bundles” packages that place ads in content across Discover publishers according to specific themes such as entertainment.
Dive Insight:
Snapchat is slowly rolling out features that are more partner and marketer friendly. The latest move is allowing its Discover portal publisher partners to deep link their content outside of Snapchat. Previously users could only find Discover content by visiting publishers’ channels. Now those publishers can tweet links to their Snapchat content, post them on Facebook and otherwise share those links anywhere they choose to drive traffic to their Discover channel.
The move seems obvious in that Snapchat is gaining the additional traffic driven by its publisher partner efforts, but the ephemeral social sharing platform has become notorious for carving out its own path and policies for advertising on the app as well as what its partners are allowed, and not allowed, to do.
A publishing source who helps run a Discover channel told Digiday, “The channels are working on new ways to get people into Snapchat beyond just having to open the Snapchat app.”
