Dive Brief:
- Marketers want to reach Snapchat’s millennial and Gen Z audience, but have faced issues with the cost for entry – hundreds of thousands of dollars per campaign – and lack of solid performance metrics.
- Because of Snapchat’s lack of API for data about its influencers and ad performance, marketers are left relying on screenshots from its ad partners’ personal metrics to find out the reach of that ad buy.
- This is unlike influencer campaigns with YouTube, Vine and Instagram, where marketers do have access to metrics.
Dive Insight:
In fact, when working with platforms like Instagram, marketers get detailed reports on how their ad campaigns have performed.
Alexa Tonner, head of partnerships at Collectively, which helps connect marketers with digital influencers, told the Wall Street Journal, “Nothing is public on Snapchat, and it’s taken brands time to wrap their heads around that.”
And unlike Facebook, for instance, the messaging app doesn't publicly post viewer numbers or subscriber figures.
“You can have millions of dollars paid out in these [influencer] campaigns, and they’re basically being run on screenshots and text messages between C-level executives and teenagers,” Misha Talavera, co-founder of NeoReach, told the Journal. “Stuff can get messed up.”
At the same time ad placements on Snapchat are expensive, starting at $100,000, a figure actually down from $700,000 just last year, according to sources with knowledge of the matter who spoke with Venture Beat. The Financial Times has said the app is charging brands up to $750,000 on holidays, $450,000 for non-holiday days for Sponsored Lens campaigns.
Marketers are willing to pay that amount because Snapchat is serving six billion videos a day to an audience that is 63% 18 to 34.
Most recently, Snapchat has been actively vying for political ad dollars hoping to reach its demographic slice.
