Dive Brief:
- Snapchat will soon provide behavioral targeting for advertisers, the company's Director of Revenue Operations Clement Xue said in a recent eMarketer report, according to Business Insider.
- The targeting will be based on users’ activity within the app. Snapchat did not comment.
- Snapchat plans to offer the capability to advertisers in Q3 of this year.
Dive Insight:
The social media app, which is very popular with Millennials and Gen Z, has long been known for lacking the targeting and measurement tools that social media marketers are accustomed to. Even though Snapchat has been careful to protect its user base from intrusive ads, it has been making moves to attract advertisers by launching an API and improving targeting and measurement capabilities.
Right now, advertisers can target Snapchat users via age, gender, location, device or OS, mobile carrier, and content affinity based on the Discover portal. Snapchat said it won’t be using any data from other online activities for ad targeting, including users’ login information for Bitmoji, a recent Snapchat acquisition.
Snapchat’s rumored behavioral targeting offering comes at a time when eMarketer forecasts the social app's user base will grow by 27% this year and keep up double digit growth into next year. As it grows, Snapchat is becoming increasingly mainstream: Its young user base is growing older, with eMarketer forecasting that the app will most of its new users from demographics older than millennials and Gen Z.
Snapchat's growing importance to advertisers may create more challenges for another social platform, Twitter. The social media rival is struggling with stagnant user growth and weak ad revenues while reports suggest that Snapchat has been gobbling up ad dollars that would otherwise go to the micro-blogging platform.
