How a lot do Snapchat advertisements price?
Creative advertising gives you more bang for your buck, and Snapchat is a perfect channel for showcasing that. But how much do Snapchat ads cost?
When it comes to advertising on social media channels like Snapchat, the following applies: You are in control of the costs. You can constantly tweak your approach to improve your ROI.
Snapchat might be ideal for you if you are on a tight budget. At $ 2.95, the average cost per impression on Snapchat is much lower than Facebook ($ 5.12) and Instagram ($ 4.20).
With over 265 million users per day, Snapchat is also a great way to reach a large chunk of your audience. But how much can you expect to spend? Before we dive into the numbers, let's look at the impact of the cost of Snapchat ads.
5 Factors Affecting the Cost of Snapchat Ads
Snapchat is a versatile advertising platform that offers numerous ways to maximize the effectiveness of your paid social campaigns. With different ad formats, bid strategies, and campaign goals, many factors can affect the cost of your Snapchat ads.
Factor #1: Goal-based billing
The first factor behind the cost of Snapchat ads is the goals you want to focus on for your campaign. Snapchat's campaign manager is very goal-oriented. This is useful for advertisers as it allows you to focus on the results and understand how much each target conversion is costing.
One of the first things you need to decide about in your advertising is your goal. With Snapchat, you have 16 options to choose from.
16 Goals for Snapchat-based bidding
- Maximize impressions
- Swipe up (this is how people will react to your ad)
- install app
- Two second video view
- 15 second video view
- Filter approval
- Story open
- register
- purchase
- Add to Cart
- Side view
- App registration
- Add the app to the shopping cart
- App purchase
- App purchase (reintegration)
- App open (reintegration)
Getting someone to buy on your website is much more difficult than watching your video ad for two seconds. So how much you pay for your Snapchat ads depends a lot on your goals.
While you're still paying based on the number of impressions your ad receives, goal-based bidding allows you to optimize your ad placements to get a specific price per goal.
For example, if your goal is to make sales on your website, Snapchat will optimize your placement against Snapchaters with the highest buyer intent, rather than those who are most likely to watch your video for two seconds or install an app.
This allows you to optimize your advertising based on what you want to pay for each conversion.
Factor 2: bid strategy
Snapchat ads offer three main bid strategies that you can use to manage costs: auto bids, maximum bids, and target cost. You are in control of how much you spend with each option as you can set a maximum daily and lifetime spend.
While it may seem strange to allow Snapchat to decide how much to pay, there are a few things you need to remember.
First, social platforms have tremendous competition, so they must offer a good return on investment in order to earn your advertising fees.
Second, they have incredible algorithms that advertisers can use to get results. Therefore, it is recommended that you use these bid strategies.
The 3 bid strategies for Snapchat
1. Automatic bidding
Auto-bidding allows Snapchat to bid on your behalf and decide how much to pay for each impression. You set your daily budget and Snapchat uses its algorithm to maximize the number of times people take the desired action (goal) on your ad.
2. Max bid
When you use auto bidding, Snapchat is free to determine how it uses your daily budget at its own discretion. A max bid strategy sets an upper limit on how much you are willing to bid for an impression.
Snapchat still optimizes to get the highest possible cost per action, but there is a limit to how much it can offer for each impression.
3. Target cost
The target cost bid allows you to set an average CPA (cost per action) that you want Snapchat to target. While Snapchat can't predict when someone will click your ad, this approach allows you to set a rough guideline on how much you're willing to pay for each person to take the action you want.
Factor 3: ad types
Snapchat offers advertisers six different types of ads. This is a great way to optimize your ads for your target audience.
6 Snapchat ad types
- Single image or video ads: a full screen or video ad shown in people's stories
- Collection displays: Four tippable tiles with which you can present your product collection
- Story ads: Branded tiles found in the Snapchat Discover section
- Objective AR experience: An augmented reality experience that will inspire your target group (think of the classic AR dog ears).
- Advertising: Ads that can't be skipped in the first six seconds result in minimal engagement.
- Filter: Overlays that people can add to their snapshots
As with most advertising platforms, Snapchat works on a bidding system to decide how much you will pay for each ad. Many factors affect this, including how competitive your industry is (here's an idea of how this affects Google's CPC pricing) and the audience you're targeting.
However, you can also buy ads directly through Snapchat, which gives you some insight into the value of each ad type. While most advertisers use the Campaign Manager to customize their ads, companies with large marketing budgets can go straight through Snapchat.
Based on Snapchat's direct pricing, the cost of Snapchat ads varies widely based on the type of ad and the day you advertise:
- Single image or video ads start at $ 3,000 per month
- Sponsored lenses vary a lot depending on what day you advertise:
- $ 450,000 per day Sunday through Thursday
- Friday and Saturday $ 500,000 per day
- $ 700,000 per day on Holidays and Special Occasions
While most people don't run ads on this scale, we get a glimpse of how ad types affect the cost of your Snapchat ad.
Factor 4: Snapchat ad metrics
Metrics are critical to understanding your social media campaigns and the cost of your Snapchat ads. The Snapchat ad metrics platform is very customizable so you can dig into the metrics that matter to you.
To maximize ad spend, you need to drive engagement. You can use these metrics to gauge how well you are doing this. For example, if you're getting a lot of impressions but your swipe rate is low, you need to work on engagement and inspire people to take action.
Snapchat also lets you customize your dashboard to show metrics related to your goals. When you want users to download your app, you want to see metrics that are directly related to it.
These are important metrics for how your ads are performing. Often, however, it's the engagement metrics that provide real insight into lowering the cost of your Snapchat ad.
9 Snapchat ad metrics to track
When measuring the return on investment of your Snapchat ads, here are some of the top metrics to look out for:
- Spend: Total amount spent on the campaign so far
- Impressions: The number of times your ad was viewed
- eCPM: average cost per thousand views
- degrees: Number of ads that have at least 97% completed
- Average screen time: How long, on average, users spend viewing your ads
- eCPV: average cost per video view (two seconds or more)
- Swipe ups: The number of times people swiped up to see your attachment
- Swipe rate: The average number of times when people swiped up to see your attachment
- eCPSU: average cost per up wipe
Factor 5: quality of Snapchat ads
Ad quality is a popular concept in paid ads, especially when it comes to metrics like Google's Quality Score. This rating focuses on the quality of the user experience for your ad and the associated landing page offering that Google considers when bidding for ad placement.
While Snapchat doesn't have an explicit ad quality metric, it can have an impact on the cost of your Snapchat ads.
Like any social media platform, Snapchat makes its money off of advertising (up to $ 2.5 billion in 2020). However, this doesn't mean that advertisers are the only problem. Snapchat also wants to provide a good experience for its users. That is why ad quality is important.
If Snapchatters can't get enough of your ad and it results in too much engagement, it's in Snapchat's best interest to serve that ad over a low quality ad.
Snapchat lists the goals of its auctions as follows:
- Delivering the right ad to the right user
- Determine how much to charge the winner ad
You'll notice which goal is listed here first, which indicates the importance of ad quality. Snapchat explains it best:
We want to generate positive advertiser value while ensuring that consumers continue to have positive experiences on the platform.
In order to achieve this, the auction winners are selected not only on the basis of the advertiser's bid, but also with the inclusion of a quality and relevance component.
So when you are considering how much Snapchat ads cost, your focus is on creating a high quality ad.
What should you be spending on Snapchat ads?
How much you spend on Snapchat ads depends on your Snapchat marketing strategy. You need to consider your industry, the size of your company, your marketing goals, your budget, and your target audience.
Snapchat has a minimum daily amount of $ 5. So you have to spend at least that much. Remember, you can set a daily budget, a lifetime budget, and spending caps for each campaign. That way, you have a ton of control over how much you spend on Snapchat ads.
As mentioned earlier, Snapchat ads cost around $ 2.95 per thousand impressions. However, this cost can shift dramatically based on the number of advertisers, your industry, and a number of other factors we've already covered.
On average, companies spend a little more than 10% of their total budget on marketing. This will give you a rough idea of what you might want to invest in your Snapchat ads. The percentage of your marketing you spend on Snapchat ultimately depends on the success of your ads.
As with any investment, ROI is key. If you find that Snapchat offers a higher return on your ad spend than other platforms, consider increasing your budget.
Conclusion
How much do Snapchat ads cost? Ultimately, you are in control of it. You can decide how much to spend on Snapchat ads.
Snapchat offers a great deal of flexibility so that you can set strict boundaries and define what success looks like for your business. Snapchat will then optimize your campaigns so that your ads are displayed to the people most likely to take your desired action and help you get the most out of your budget.
If you need help managing your social media channels and integrating them into your overall digital marketing strategy, schedule a consultation with our team. We'll show you how we can help you succeed.
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