In the early days of advertising, marketers relied on things like targeting to help differentiate ad products that weren’t very engaging. Nowadays, with stunning full screen video on our smartphones, brands can build highly engaged audiences on Snapchat.
With over 100 million daily active users, Snapchat has become one of the most popular apps among Millennials, a normally hard to reach demographic. Because the app is designed for the user, it provides little insights for marketers to gather data and lacks the analytics tools that can help display content performance on a dashboard, like Facebook or Twitter has. This is one of the biggest challenges marketers have been experiencing because in order to analyze their Snapchat efforts, they must analyze the data manually, which takes too much time.
COLLECTING DATA FROM SNAPCHAT CONTENT
By taking a look at the information Snapchat provides, we can find the tangible metrics that can help us gain an insight on Snapchat efforts. But before we learn how to start collecting the data from our Snapchat content, lets first learn a little about the various functions within the application and how they help us achieve our marketing goals.
Snapchat has two unique content features that we can leverage: the private snap feature and the story feature.
As those of you who use this app know, a private snap allows us to send brief text messages, photos or videos directly to our contacts. When the message is delivered, we can see the number of people who opened it, took a screenshot or whether or not the person responded to the content with a direct message back to you.
The only limitation to this feature is that it can only be done in small groups between one and fifty individuals at a time, and even though this method helps a brand create a relationship with the user, it is an arduous task when managing a large community.
The Snapchat story feature provides similar data to the prior such as views on snaps, screenshots and responses, however, unlike the prior, it allows you to access the data for a period of 24 hours.
For brands with larger audiences, using the private snap feature could be effective to use on a sample of users when testing new content, whereas the story feature could be used for mass communication with its audience.
MEASURING SNAPCHAT CONTENT EFFORTS
Because Snapchat doesn’t have an analytics platform, the only way we can measure its content efforts is by developing a base of metrics that aligns with the organization’s goals.
We can determine the open rate by tracking the number of snaps sent, received and opened. Measuring the open rate over time can be a signal that the content is influencing the audience. We can also document how often the audience takes a screenshot or respond with a message, and if that snap was a photo, video, if it had text, emoticon, a drawing, etc. in order to better understand over a period of time what type of content moves our audience to create engagement. Variables such as the time of day posted, the amount of posts, the content, the length of the video, among others are also important to effectively analyze the data.
The following metrics together with your data will help you evaluate how each type of content influences the audience. (These formulas were provided by Time magazine)
Completion Rate % = Total Views in Last Snap ÷ Total Views in First Snap
Screenshot Rate % = Total Screenshots ÷ Total Views in Given Snap
Many brands such as Head & Shoulders and JBL have started to work with social influencers to create original content and to build engaging and interactive experiences.
Here is Mark Kaye, radio host and social media celebrity, promoting JBL headphones on his talk show on Snapchat.
Sphero launched a global Snapchat campaign for the new Star Wars toy, the BB-8 droid, that generated over 10 million views in just 24 hours. Instead of paying for advertisements, it had Snapchatters in Paris, London, Dublin, New York and San Francisco posting videos throughout the day featuring shoppers camping out of the stores waiting to buy the BB-8 toy and teasing the event. Not only did the campaign exceed on the first day the expected 6 million views, but it also resonated outside of Snapchat as people took screenshots of the Snapchats and shared them on different social platforms. Outside of Snapchat, it generated half a million engagements.
While it may appear an onerous task to effectively measure your Snapchat marketing efforts, with a thorough understanding of the platform and with careful attention to the goals of your organization/ brand, you can start creating a number of content marketing wins with this amazing application.
