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What Is Dropshipping & How Do You Get Started?
Understanding dropshipping and steps to launch your own online business
May 2, 2024
16 min read
In this article, I will talk about the specific steps you need to take to run ads on Snapchat.
In addition, we will discuss:
In the end, I’m positive that you should be armed with knowledge in making sales on the Snapchat platform.
For perspective, it will take you around 10 years to view all the photos uploaded to Snapchat only in the last hour. Snapchat has 464 million users globally and the company is expecting to grow this number to 500 million by the end of 2025.
Here are some more Snapchat stats you need to know:
Although Snapchat is not as big as TikTok and Facebook, it does have a subscription option. As of 2023, Snapchat has three million paying subscribers, which means that there are people on this platform who have money to spend.
If these three million subscribers could spend $3.99 monthly for an app, they certainly can spend money on buying stuff from the app, and this is what you need to bank on.
Although Snapchat is small compared to other social media giants, one key factor you have to consider is the audience. Most people on Facebook are there for friends and politics and fan pages, not for trends. The same thing goes with Instagram—it is a place for influencers and people who follow them.
Snapchat’s demographic is fresh and young. In addition, these are people willing to spend money. So, while the average conversion rate of Snapchat is small, its users are more willing to buy than the audiences of other platforms. Below are some more reasons to advertise on Snapchat.
Users of Snapchat are real close friends and family members. The emotional investment here is real and current, as opposed to Facebook where your friends from 30 years ago would add you although you have nothing in common anymore.
Snapchat friends share the same interest. Because of this, one person’s recommendation or shares will get more attention, shares, and re-shares than on Facebook.
As a result, people on Snapchat have more influence than so-called influencers on typical social media. In short, the voice of a Snapchat user has more power than a celebrity.
Snapchat has 375 million active users per day. Since Snapchat only keeps posts for 24 hours, these users have more reasons to open the app. On average, a Snapchatter opens the app 30 times a day.
The platform is also home to the young generation—people who want to be “in.” Facebook and Instagram are inundated with people who are so desensitized and disinterested in ads. FB and Instagram users do not have an intention to buy.
Young people want to buy stuff. Old people are much more concerned about saving for retirement. Twitter, or X, also has users who are not interested in buying—they are much more inclined to talk or follow politicians and political influencers.
There are three main ways you can take advantage of Snapchat’s advertising platform, and these ways stay true to the mantra of a marketer.
You can advertise on Snapchat to:
As a dropshipper, you want to concentrate on the third goal. It makes no sense to launch an ad for awareness and consideration.
Awareness campaigns are best for national food chains introducing a new product. Consideration is for big brands like Nike—they launch ads to entice people to change sneaker brands.
Dropshippers and online retailers want conversions, and you can advertise on Snapchat with this goal. You can leverage Snapchat to drive traffic to your store and increase sales.
One thing you must leverage with Snapchat is its targeting capabilities. Like Facebook, you can create a custom audience and choose a specific gender, age bracket, and other interest-related characteristics. In addition.
Before you can create an ad on Snapchat, you have to create a profile. It is similar to how Facebook works—you must have a personal profile that allows the company to identify you.
To start, go to the home page of Snapchat, and then click on Snapchat Ads at the top right corner of the page.
You will see this, the landing page of the Snapchat ads manager:
From here, click on CREATE AD, and you will have this page:
Fill out the details and then click on SIGN UP & ACCEPT. The system may ask you to complete a captcha captcha verification, like rotating an image in the proper direction. Complete that, and you will see this:
It is here where you need to type your business name. Do that and then click NEXT. You will see this:
Fill this out and then click NEXT. The blue box you see is the area where you select your country and type your phone number. I covered my phone number for privacy reasons. Click NEXT, and you will see this:
Upload a profile pic for your business by clicking on the CAMERA+ icon. The website will open a pop-up like this:
Once done, click on OK at the bottom right. And you will see this:
Click on CREATE PUBLIC PROFILE. Then, the option below will show. It is up to you to get an offer or skip it. I am skipping it because the ad we are making now is only a demo.
Our Snapchat profile is now complete. After clicking on MAYBE LATER, you will see this:
Click on INSTANT CREATE, and you will see this:
Snapchat, unlike other sites, does not have a conversion-based ad goal. Since we are selling from our website, we will choose WEB VISITS.
Enter your website URL, and then click NEXT.
Now, you can upload a photo or video for your ad. After the upload is complete, you will be redirected to this page:
This is the page where you type your brand name and headline. You must also choose a Call to Action (CTA) There are several other CTAs like Download, Visit Site, Install App, etc. The right side of this page is where you will see what the ad looks like once it is live.
Now, scroll down and you will see this:
This is the page where you can choose a layout for your ad. Look at the right side (ad preview) to see what it looks like. After making a selection, click NEXT, and you will see this.
Type your desired audience location, and a dropdown will appear. The right side of this page will show you the audience size. In this case, it is at least 97 million. As you add more locations and narrow your demographics, this audience size can either grow or get smaller.
Scroll down further, and you will see these options:
From here, you can choose the gender target. It is also in this area where you can change the age demographics.
Now, click on SHOW ADVANCED TARGETING.
This will expand the DEMOGRAPHICS options.
As you can see, now we can toggle our audience based on INTERESTS AND CUSTOM AUDIENCES. What you need to do here is to type keywords, and then select from the dropdown that the system will show you.
If you look at the DELIVERY ESTIMATES on the right side, our audience size went down from 97 million to 38 million.
Now, scroll down and you will see this:
This is where you set up your daily ad budget, your advertising start and end date, and your business address. I did not put an address for security and privacy reasons, but you should do this from your end.
The last part is to scroll down again. Here, you will see a summary of your ad creative. The last step is to add your credit card number and hit PUBLISH!
Snapchat, being a video and image-oriented social site, offers a multitude of metrics you can view. These metrics are the things that will tell you how your ad is performing and what problems to fix. In this section, we will look at a few metrics that matter the most.
You will see two impression numbers in your ad stats: paid and total. Paid impression refers to the number of times the Snapchat algorithm shows your ad to a user. Total impression is the sum of both paid and earned impressions.
Earned impression happens when a Snapchat user shares your ad. So, if you paid for one impression a Snapchatter shared it, and one person viewed it, your total impression is two.
Here are some key pointers:
What you want is to have a high impression count. You want a lot of people to see your ad. So, it is either you target new audiences with more genders and ages and interests, or you increase your bid, so your ad gets priority.
There are two types of video views: 2-second and 15-second. A 2-second video view is a view where the viewer watches your video on full screen for two seconds before swiping up.
On the other hand, a 15-second video means the viewer viewed your video ad at least 15 seconds or watched 97% of your video length (if your video is less than 15 seconds in total).
What you want is to have a high number on both, as a high number means people who see your video ads are interested. A low 2-second video view count should be alarming, as the viewer saw your thumbnail, decided it was not interesting and left.
This metric measures how many people are watching your videos 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the time. The very thing you want here is for people to watch your complete video.
If most people who saw your ad watched only 25% of your video, it means that they are not interested in what they saw. They only watched ¼ of your video and decided to leave.
In this case, you are either targeting the wrong people, or your video is not that interesting. I suggest that you do an A/B test to figure out the root cause of a low video play stat.
A profile click refers to the total number of times a viewer of your ad tapped your public profile link. A high number is good, and it is indicative that the viewer wanted to see who you are.
A swipe-up stat or metric refers to the number of times people swiped up your ad; it also is a number that represents the total taps or clicks to your call-to-action button.
On Snapchat, a swipe-up on your ad is good, not bad. A swipe-up allows the user to chat with you, so you want to aim for a high swipe-up rate.
There is no single method to analyze an ad. However, your main goal for a start is to have a high impression rate, especially an earned impression rate. A high earned impression rate means you are getting eyeballs for free because Snapchatters are sharing your content.
Unlike Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, Snapchat does not have an ad library. They have what they call a Creative Ad Library, but this is nothing more than the equivalent of an Ads Manager. The absence of an Ad Library is a challenge, but we have some alternatives as to where you can get ideas for Snapchat ads.
Ads Reveal is the only true ad spy tool that has access to Snapchat ads. With it, you will have visibility on ads and ad content that run on Snapchat.
You will see:
You can play the video of these ads, but the program does not show ad stats. There is no data on the shares, likes, comments, conversions, etc.
A better option than Ads Reveal is the TikTok Ad Library. Here, you see multiple ads and will get a better perspective as to how an ad is performing. If you think about it, the demographic of TikTok and Snapchat has similarities. They are both catering to young audiences.
Here are the things you can do with the TikTok Ad Library:
One thing that you will love about TikTok is that you will also have visibility on important ad metrics. Some examples of these are:
There is also a CTR bracket here. For example, if an ad is in the top 6% of CTR, it means that of all ads on TikTok, the ad you are looking at belongs to the top 6% of all ads that generated the most clicks.
As far as third-party support goes, there is little help you can expect from Snapchat because it is not one of the biggest platforms. Globally, it ranks number 12 among social media sites. In this case, it is not a top priority for advertisers.
And if it is not a priority of advertisers, third-party data aggregators will also not pay attention to it that much. This is not to say that you should not advertise here. There are buyers on Snapchat, and I can say that it is one of the most undermined sites as far as advertising goes.
Advertising on Snapchat is a tad different from other platforms. In typical social media, you whip up an ad, choose your target audience, and you let the algorithm do its work. Snapchat requires a bit more work, and below are some tips on how to succeed.
What makes Snapchat so unique is that it has what they call AR Lenses, or Augmented Reality. What it does is that Snapchat can use a phone’s camera to take a photo or video, say, of a pizza.
With the AR Lense feature, a pizza company like Domino’s Pizza can create filters that will show the company’s logo.
In addition, a company can create facial lenses that will transform the image of a person taking a video or image of himself on Snapchat. Most companies that do this are fashion and cosmetic companies, but you can do the same if you are selling in the same niche.
Snapchat offers several ways to create multiple ads for a custom audience.
Below are a few:
At first, you should target a wide range of people on the platform. Make sure you install the Snap Pixel before you advertise. Once done, let the algorithm gather data, and then retarget the people who interacted with your brand.
We cannot stress this enough—your ad must be interesting enough to stop a user from his tracks and watch your video. Ensure that you take the time to read the idea dimensions of the video that Snapchat uses in the ads.
Once done, create clear videos, and then professionally write an ad copy. The TikTok Ad Library is a good way to start to check out ad copies that garner the most clicks, shares, and comments. It can take some time to learn how to write a decent ad copy, but it is worth it.
Yes, Snapchat ads work for dropshipping. However, the average conversion rate in Snapchat is only 0.6%. Do not be alarmed. YouTube has a lower conversion rate than this at 0.5%.
To run Snapchat ads targeting your Shopify store, initiate the ad creation process on Snapchat’s platform and ensure to input your Shopify store’s URL when specifying the destination for web visits in Snapchat.
You can run Snapchat ads by first creating a profile. After clicking on CREATE AD, Snapchat will guide you through the whole process.
The tool will tell you your minimum cost. It varies from one business to another, but this cost has something to do with your target location.
Snapchat is the social media for the hip and trendy. It is also the only social media where its members are more willing to pay for a monthly subscription. The reason is that the members of Snapchat are more close-knit than other social media channels.
The next step now is to create your Snapchat profile and then set up a business account so you can start advertising. Or, you can browse our other tutorials on how to run ads on different social media platforms.
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