Snapchat is set to shake up its advertising options and provide a whole new raft of possibilities for potential clients.
The new series of advert targeting options the popular photo platform is launching are more advanced than its previous offers, suggesting that the company is trying to up the ante to compete in the increasingly competitive social media market.
The first of the three new additions is Snap Audience Match, which enables advertisers to combine their own lists of email addresses or mobile app IDs with Snapchat’s data. Having been quietly testing this over the last few months, Snapchat’s aim is to improve its ability to target customers with appropriate advertising.
Second on the list is Snapchat Lifestyle Categories, which allows brands to target their adverts based on what types of content users consume. For instance, if they regularly check out Disney’s news channel, then they’ll likely be interested in kids films.
Lookalikes is the final new offering. It will allow the platform to match users based on their audience data, enabling it to then use collected groups as templates for similar audiences.
These moves may be signalling an attempt by Snapchat to step up its game against Facebook, Twitter and the other big players in the market.
It’s hardly a small player itself, of course – its daily reach covers around 41 percent of 18 to 34 year-olds in the USA, and it’s valued at $20 billion. But its advertising options have been rather simplistic up until now compared to its competitors, covering a relatively small range of options including age, gender, interests, location and what mobile device a person is using.
The platform also faces fresh competition from the likes of Facebook’s new ‘Lifestage’ feature, whereby users can gather points and improve their ranking by generating new content. It appears to be a more competitive version of Snapchat.
Of course, these aren’t the only features Snapchat has added to its mix in recent months. Over the past 90 days, it’s launched an ad API; improved discovery options; included a new custom Geofilter tool; and there have also been reports of its behavioural targeting tools expanding, among other things. This is very clearly a platform that has its eyes on a bigger market share in the future.
