If you wanted to advertise on Snapchat a couple of years ago, you had to be willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on custom campaigns.
Now the app's parent company, Snap Inc., offers several ways to easily advertise through more than a dozen partners that help sell its inventory, which ranges from video ads to sponsored geofilters.
Starting this June, Snap is going a step further by flinging wide its gates to advertisers of all sizes and budgets with a new suite of self-service tools. The move could help considerably grow Snap's fledgling ad business, which is expected to reach $1 billion in revenue this year.
Releasing a self-service ads manager is intended to erase any friction that may be keeping advertisers off Snapchat, a company spokesperson told Business Insider. Snap expects larger buyers to still go through one of its auction partners, which offer more custom targeting like timing ads to run alongside TV campaigns or during specific weather conditions.
Snapchat's new ads manager will let any advertiser buy, manage, and view reporting for their campaigns. All ad formats, including app install ads, sponsored geofilters, and fullscreen video, are available alongside existing targeting capabilities like goal-based bidding. The manager is free to use and requires no minimum ad spend.
A new mobile dashboard will also allow marketers to see their ads like a normal user, view analytics, and get notification updates about their campaigns directly from the Snapchat app. Over 20 brands are testing these new tools now as part of a private beta, and Snap plans to make them available to everyone in June.
“90% of the stuff we would want is all there," Ameesh Paleja, the CEO of mobile movie ticketing app Atom Tickets, told Business Insider in an interview. “You don’t need a lot of training to start using it."
Atom Tickets, which is headquartered down the street from Snap in Santa Monica, California, has been testing the app's new ad manager over the past several weeks. Paleja said his company has purchased app install campaigns in Snapchat and has been impressed with the targeting capabilities the app offers for reaching people in certain "lifestyle" categories, like millennial women who enjoy going to the movies.
“These guys have made it brain-dead easy, which is awesome," he said, noting that Atom plans to spend more on Snapchat with the new self-service tool. “They hit a home run.”
Here are some screenshots of Snapchat's new ad manager:
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