Dive Brief:

• Snapchat announced on Wednesday a partnership with technology company Oracle to use its Data Cloud to measure how ads on the social platform impact in-store sales, according to Bloomberg. 
• As part of the partnership, Oracle Data Cloud analyzed 12 ad campaigns for CPG products, finding that 92% of the Snapchat ad campaigns increased in-store sales.
• Oracle becomes Snapchat's tenth ad measurement partner in the last 12 months. 

Dive Insight:

A social media darling with users ever since ;launch, Snapchat now seems to have finally arrived as a top-tier social media platform for marketers and advertisers. Snapchat recently surpassed Twitter in average daily users and boasts as many (or more) daily video views than Facebook at around 10 billion.

Not long into its existence, Snapchat began amassing a user base that skewed heavily toward millennials (and now Gen Z), making it a very attractive social media territory for marketers looking to reach those coveted demographics.

But early on, advertising options were limited and the ability to target users and measure the impact of ads was non-existent. Over the last year, Snapchat has made a number of moves to rectify both issues, including bringing in two new executives in March to specifically address measurement. After a slow start, Oracle now becomes Snapchat’s tenth measurement partner.

Snapchat this week also announced its ad and creative partners programs and the release of its automated application programming interface (API). All these moves that stand to make advertising on the app easier and more effective, and legitimize its new standing in the social media universe. 

"We have listened and we have worked really hard — and all of the major partnership solutions you’ve asked for, we have a good number of them in place," Clement Xue, global head of revenue operations at Snapchat, told Bloomberg. "I don’t think there’s any other publisher or platform that has put together these measurement partnerships as quickly as we have.”

The deal with Oracle addresses an issue that is of particular interest to retail marketers — the ability to track the performance of in-app advertising and then connect those ads to in-store sales. It's not the only major social platform hoping to help retailers bridge the omnichannel gap: Facebook this week announced new measurement tools that allow advertisers to see how many people go to a store after seeing a Facebook campaign, optimize ads based on store visits, and analyze results across stores and regions to plan and optimize future campaigns.