A previous Perspective post broke the relationship between advertisers and Snapchat. Now, Snapchat will be giving advertisers more analytics on how their ads are doing to drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortars.
This has stemmed from the ever-growing copy-cat game that companies are now playing. By now you have seen that Instagram has stories and now Facebook has also added stories to their messenger app.
Now business practices are being copied. Snapchat has started to roll out measurements online to offline traffic. Facebook started the tracking method with their ads less than a year ago. Snapchat has also added more ways for marketers to send people from the app to their stores.
This feature is called Snap to Store. It tracks the number of people who use Snapchat in a brand’s physical location. It looks at the number of people who go to a store within one week of seeing one of Snap’s vertical-oriented mobile ads.
Companies that were the first to test include 7-Eleven, Paramount Pictures and Wendy’s.
The Wendy’s ad resulted in more than 42,000 people visiting a restaurant within the seven-day period that Snap to Story tracks. And according to Brandon Rhoten the head of advertising, digital, social and media at Wendy’s, “Foot traffic into our restaurants is the best measurement of short-term sales success for any program—we want more ad tech like this.”
Snapchat can only tell if someone visited a brand’s location if that person uses Snapchat in that location. The company is not tracking people’s location when the app is running in the background.
Snapchat’s Snap to Store measurement shows advertisers how many people who visited their location had seen the brand’s ad on Snapchat. But for privacy reasons, it only occurs when at least 1,00 people have used the app/ad. It also shows how many visitors did not see the ad but used Snapchat. Snapchat is also launching a dashboard that includes a chart plotting the first time people visit a location that uses a 28-day window.
On the downside for smaller businesses, they cannot see Snap to Store measurements for individual locations. In this instance, a geofilter is a much better option.
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