In this guide
- Snapchat campaigns follow objective, audience, placement and format, bid and budget, creative.
- Use Snap Audience Match for customer lists and the Snap Pixel with the Conversions API for events.
- Start with one goal and a few creatives.
Snapchat's tools resemble Meta's and TikTok's, with their own names. This page walks through a first campaign and the choices that matter, aimed at someone who has run ads elsewhere. Snapchat changes its products and labels, so check Ads Manager for current options. See benefits of Snapchat ads for the strategic view and Snapchat Conversions API for tracking.
The steps
Choose an objective
Such as sales, leads, app installs or traffic. Pick the one that matches your goal.
Set the audience
Location, age, interests and behaviours, or your own list with Snap Audience Match, and lookalikes where available.
Choose placements and format
Snap Ads, Story Ads, Collection Ads and others.
Set the bid and budget
Auto-bid to start, a daily budget that can deliver enough conversions.
Upload creative
Vertical, short, captions on, product in the first seconds.
Install the Snap Pixel
And add the Conversions API.
Launch and review
After a few days, with enough data.
Check your tracking in one pass
This is an example. Run the check on your own site to see where yours stands.
Audiences
| Type | Use |
|---|---|
| Demographic and interest | Prospecting |
| Snap Audience Match | Upload hashed customer data to target or exclude |
| Lookalikes | Find people similar to a seed |
| Pixel-based audiences | Website visitors, with consent |
Bidding
Auto-bid lets Snapchat choose bids to reach your goal. Goal bids let you set a target cost. Start with auto-bid, and move to a goal when you have enough conversions to know your cost.
3 things to remember
Scroll and the points stack up.
Snapchat campaigns follow objective, audience, placement and format, bid and budget, creative.
Use Snap Audience Match for customer lists and the Snap Pixel with the Conversions API for events.
Start with one goal and a few creatives.
The pixel and API
The Snap Pixel reports on-site actions. The Conversions API sends events from your server. Share a deduplication ID, and pass the click ID, cookie, hashed customer data, IP and user agent. See Snapchat Conversions API.
Reading results
- Look at cost per result and conversion rate, not only swipe-ups.
- Compare Snapchat conversions with your store.
- Give campaigns a few days to settle.
- Retire weak creatives and make variations of strong ones.
A realistic example
A small fashion label tries Snapchat for the first time with a $50 daily budget. It picks the sales objective, uploads its customer list for exclusion and a lookalike, makes three vertical videos of under ten seconds with captions and installs the pixel and Conversions API with a shared ID. After a week it pauses the weakest video, which had a high swipe rate but few purchases, and moves budget to the one with the best cost per purchase. It compares Snapchat's reported purchases with its store and sees a stable gap, which it accepts as the cost of in-app browsing. A first campaign does not need to be perfect. It needs a clear goal, clean tracking and a habit of reading results against the store.
Orders from your store, back to the ad that earned them
Your store sends the order once. Open Tracked passes it on to each ad platform, cleaned and deduplicated.
Frequently asked questions
How do Snapchat ads work?
You choose an objective, audience, format, bid and creative in Ads Manager, and track results with the Snap Pixel and Conversions API.
What is Snap Audience Match?
A way to upload hashed customer lists to target or exclude them.
Which bid should I start with?
Auto-bid.
What creative works?
Vertical, short, captioned video that shows the product early.
How do I measure Snapchat ads?
With the pixel and Conversions API, compared with your store data.
Do I need spreadsheets to read my results?
No. Once tracking is live, the Open Tracked analytics shows spend, revenue, ROAS and profit, and you can ask Ari, the built-in AI assistant, questions about your own numbers in plain words. Ari's allowance depends on your analytics plan.
Is Open Tracked different from Open Track or Open Space Track?
No. Open Tracked is the official name of our server-side tracking platform, and the website is opentracked.io. Many people search for it as Open Track, OpenTrack or Open Space Track. All of them lead to the same product: server-side Google Tag Manager hosting, first-party analytics and a CRM pipeline.
Fix your tracking at the source
Open Tracked hosts your server-side Tag Manager, keeps first-party cookies alive and shows what each ad is really worth.
The Open Tracked team
We build Open Tracked: server-side tracking hosting, analytics and the tools around them, for stores that spend on ads. Questions about this guide, or an idea for the next one?
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