Intelligent Creative for Snap Retail & eCommerce Marketers

There are a handful of questions we hear time and time again from our marketing clients — how do I know if my ads are working? How can I keep up with all the new ad formats? How can I create content quickly and at scale? How can I do all of that in a cost-efficient way?

Do these questions ring a bell? In this post, we’re going to share hot-off-the-press insights about creative drivers of ROI for Retail & eCommerce Snap Ads. If you are a Retail or eCommerce brand advertising on Snapchat, you may learn a thing or two to consider for your next campaign. If you come from a different industry, give this a read because you will learn how to approach the ad design process armed with actionable data to produce Intelligent Creative.

With the rise of mobile-first content and social eCommerce, advertisers are constantly faced with marketplace challenges on how to optimize brand awareness and increase ROAS across Snapchat video ads. According to App Annie’s State of Mobile 2021 Report, social commerce and live shopping present a $2 trillion market globally by 2024. This Mobile Commerce boom is shifting shopping behaviors, with $240B Mobile ad spend and a 26% YoY growth.

So many choices are made when creating a retail ad on Snapchat, and brands are looking for insights that will make their creative work harder by being smarter.

It’s no secret that creative drives campaign performance, but previously there was no easy way of testing and learning from creative decisions at scale – until now. VidMob’s platform not only identifies all the elements in your Snap Ads, but tells you which creative elements are leading to differences (either positive or negative) in performance metrics. At a time when consumers are bombarded with video content, every millisecond can make a difference in whether or not you win attention. Every creative decision matters.

How Intelligent Creative Drives Success on Snap

VidMob recently analyzed 11K Snap Ads that generated a total of 3.9 billion impressions across 28 retail and eCommerce brands to identify ad design elements that are meaningfully moving the needle on performance. We examined a variety of industry verticals including apparel, department stores, luxury, grocery, and home goods. Below are highlights of our findings.

Awareness

For Awareness, we used the most common success metrics for campaigns on Snap as our KPIs: Video View Rate (VVR) and Swipe Rate

Ads with People

• Ads with human presence, whether a single person or multiple, saw a 45% lift in VVR.

Close Ups

• Ads that included a close up of a person yielded a 120% lift in VVR.

Conversion

For Conversion, Visual elements that generated a dramatic lift in ROAS were:

Showcasing the Product

• Videos that showed a product actively being used saw a 151% lift in ROAS,
 compared to when the product was featured
 in an e-commerce setting.

Content Type

• Shorter, GIF-style
 ads saw a
 173% lift in ROAS compared to long-form content.

While these are just a few insights, there’s a lot more to the story.

This report offers insights about the effectiveness of creative attributes in Snap Ads for a set of retail and eCommerce brands. You can use these findings directionally when designing your Snap Ads. However, what worked for the ads analyzed in this study may not work for all campaigns. Every brand and campaign has unique characteristics. It is usually the small details—like word choice, logo size, color choice —that determine if a consumer will engage with an ad. These details produce different results from one platform to the next.

Want to know what works best for your brand on Snap? Let’s talk.

To learn about the insights in more depth and hear what’s on the horizon for VidMob & Snap, watch the eMarketer Tech Talk Webinar, featuring VidMob CEO, Alex Collmer, and Snap Creative Strategy Lead, Retail and eCommerce, Tom Bates.