16 creative Snapchat ad examples (and why they work)

Are your Snapchat ads falling flat, failing to engage your audience? Look no further! In this blog, we unveil 16 remarkable Snapchat ad examples that not only captivate but also convert.

Snapchat is an exciting advertising channel that you might want to consider using for your business. Snapchat provides interactive and cost-effective ad options with cheaper CPAs and higher LTVs, so you can maximize your profit margin to scale your business much faster than other channels.

According to research by Hootsuite, here are some key Snapchat ad statistics to consider when advertising on the platform:

• Snapchat's potential global reach encompasses 11.4% of internet users and 7.2% of the global population, with 107 million Snapchat users in the US alone.
• In 2022, Snapchat saw a 7% year-over-year increase in ad reach, reaching 38 million more people.
• Gen Z dominates Snapchat's user base, with a global spending power of $4.4 trillion.
• The 35-plus market on Snapchat is growing, with a 40% increase in daily engagement with shows and publisher content.
• Snapchat users find purpose-driven ads 8% more immersive and engaging.
• After watching a Snapchat ad, users are 34% more likely to make a purchase and 45% more likely to recommend the brand to friends.
• In the US, the direct spending power across Millennials and Gen Z Snapchat users is a combined $1 trillion.

These statistics underscore why Snapchat poses a huge market opportunity and opens up a lot of possibilities for growing your business.

Now, let's dive into 16 Snapchat ad examples to inspire your next Snapchat campaign!

16 Snapchat ad examples

Domino’s Pizza “New Bigger Better” campaign

The popular pizza brand Domino's used Snap ads to launch their “New Bigger Better” pizzas campaign in Europe. By using Snap Ads, Commercials (non-skippable video ads), and Filters, they reached more than 800k unique Norwegian Snapchatters around their restaurants.

The campaign was created to be humorous for the target audience and showcase different situations where the pizza was too big to carry. Snapchatters could use the Domino’s filter to decorate their Snaps and share their creations with their friends.

This was a great success because it helped communicate that their pizzas are bigger and better than ever. This message helped increase brand awareness and drive more purchase conversions.

Starling Digital Bank "Feel good about money"

As a leading digital bank based in the UK, Starling Bank provides an intuitive mobile application for people to gain control of their finances. In 2019, they wanted to accelerate their growth using Snapchat.

Instead of just running a standard image ad, they decided to make things interesting and develop an augmented reality (AR) lens experience to bring their first-ever TV campaign to life. Through these unique experiences, they acquired tons of new users and increased brand awareness.

This experience worked well because it resonated amongst Snapchatters between the ages of 18-34 years old to download and install the paid app.

They were able to achieve a 61% lower cost per install vs. other platforms with their Snapchat ad campaign.

BACARDÍ "Do what moves you" campaign

BACARDÍ was looking to reach Snapchatters in their 20s throughout Germany to strengthen brand awareness. They produced a Lens experience to allow Snapchat users to dive deeper into the BACARDÍ summer feeling. With this new experience, they were able to reach over 2.5 M Snapchatters throughout the 10 weeks of the campaign.

In addition to the Lens experience, they used Snap Ads & Commercials to create engaging horizontal videos and promote their slogan in each scene.

They created an Always-On Filter to let Snapchatters at festivals send personalized greetings to friends. With a 24% share rate this helped promote their brand image across snaps and increase brand awareness.

By staying in front of the target audience through Snapchat’s variety of placements, they were able to increase the purchase intent of BACARDÍ products.

Sephora gamified AR

In the beauty industry, it can be challenging to stand out. Sephora took a unique approach to their Snapchat campaigns with gamified AR experience using a new Lens. This helped deliver high engagement and an increase in online sales for their brand.

After Snapchatters completed the game, they were given a coupon code and encouraged to use it right away on their website.

Subway new sanduich campaign

Subway was looking to raise awareness about their new sandwich and engage a younger demographic on Snapchat. Using Commercials, they were able to increase their reach by 25.2%.

The creative approach for Subway was to include an animated emoji after the closeup of the new sandwich to help users relate to the emotional excitement about the new menu item.

Hopper radius targeting

Hopper is an airline-booking app helping users find the best time to purchase flight tickets. Hopper used Snap ads to reach more millennials interested in travel and become active Hopper users.

What made their simple image Snap ad creatives successful was using a combination of location radius targeting and geographically-relevant offers to reach Snapchatters most likely to engage. This led to a 4x flight book rate and 50% decrease in cost-per-install.

To target Snappchatters, they used radius targeting to reach users near nationwide airports that had a high likelihood of booking travel out of each airport.

The creative was designed to promote specific flight deals that departed from that point of origin. These simple, hyper-local, action-oriented Snap ads helped drive a sense of urgency to download and use the app.

Coca-Cola 2018 World Cup national filter

The bold taste of Coca-Cola’s beverage product wasn’t the only thing that the ambitious brand wanted to maximize success with. During the 2018 World Cup in Belgium, Coca-Cola used Snapchat ads to create a National Filter to jump on the hype train with fans of their national soccer team.

The creative direction of their minimal, animated Filter featured engaging copy and animated footballs that popped up like Coca Cola bubbles.

Belgian Snapchatters shared their win and celebrated their victory over Brazil while reaching over 1.2 million total fans and achieving a share rate of 11.4%.

Pit Viper ski and snowboarding sunglasses

Founded by two skiers, Pit Viper is a fun brand that sells affordable and durable sunglasses. They took to Snapchat ads to boost sales and drive more awareness using video ads.

Promoting the laid-back essence of their brand image around ski and snowboarding, they were able to achieve a $0.15 cost-per-swipe up and $30.07 ROAS.

Their creative direction was based on designing retro-style scenes where they introduced a humorous, hip storyline that surprised users and showcased their product in action.

Tophatter app installs

Tophatter is a mobile discovery shopping app that wanted to use Snapchat to generate app installs and drive profitable ROAS.

Using a ROAS bidding strategy and demographic targeting, they were able to acquire app users and convert those users into high-value customers.

The creative direction for Tophatter was to showcase the experience of happy shopping. This included user-generated-content style Snapchat ads with one customer talking to the camera about their experience and another showing how the app works.

Promoting these exciting moments helped drive +125% ROAS at +32% above their goal.

Shipt motion graphics

Shipt is a grocery delivery service that used Snapchat ads to acquire new customers during the recent pandemic.

They went with an illustrative animation to promote their service and were able to reach over 10 million Snapchatters. This creative concept of different foods being added to a cart drove a +9pt lift in brand awareness and $0.21 cost per view.

Animations are a great way to engage users on Snapchat and can help generate brand awareness.

Ounass Dynamic Snapchat ad

Ounass is a fashion brand selling bracelets to customers in the Middle East. They wanted to increase ROAS on Snapchat and generate more revenue.

The chose to just use simple dynamic product ads to deliver personalized Snapchat ads, which lifted their conversion rate by 80% and resulted in 12X ROAS.

Promoting products can be incredibly profitable using Snapchat. With the right targeting and creative, you’re able to generate cost-efficient purchase conversions directly from Snapchat Ads.

Why Snapchat Ads Work

The digital advertising space has become increasingly more competitive and popular in today’s online marketplace. With the rise of social media giants such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram it’s becoming more expensive to advertise.

If you’re reading this today, Snapchat ads are a fantastic opportunity. As a somewhat new channel that you can advertise on, the competition is much less fierce and you can reduce your CPAs by a significant amount.

Snapchat gives you a variety of creative placement options and helps create engaging campaigns using interesting Filters, Videos, AR and Lens experiences.

The benefit of using Snapchat is that you’ll reach a younger target audience that’s more likely to engage with digital media.

To streamline performance even further, you can also set up automated rules using a tool like Revealbot and maximize your profit margins by pausing or changing ads that don’t yield your desired ROAS.

10 Tips for a better Snapchat ads strategy

Here are some tips and tricks for creating effective Snapchat ad strategies:

1. Know your audience

Snapchat users are typically younger and more engaged than users on other social media platforms.

2. Use creative and engaging visuals

Snapchat is a visual platform, so it's important to use high-quality images and videos in your ads.

3. Use Snapchat's creative tools

such as Lenses and Filters, to create engaging and interactive experiences for your audience.

4. Be authentic and relatable

Avoid using overly salesy language or pushing your products too hard.

5. Test and optimize your campaigns

It's important to test different ad creatives and targeting options to see what works best for your business.

6. Use a variety of ad formats

keep your campaigns fresh and engaging by using a variety of snap ad formats, including video, image, carousel, and collections.

7. Use geotargeting

Use geotargeting to reach Snapchat users in specific locations and demographic targeting to reach Snapchat users based on their age, gender, interests, and other factors.

8. Use custom and lookalike audiences

Reach Snapchat users who are similar to your existing customers by using custom and lookalike audiences.

9. Track your results and make adjustments as needed

Snapchat provides a variety of analytics tools that you can use to track your campaign performance.

10. Use Revealbot's automation for Snapchat ads

Use Revealbot to automate your Snapchat ads and get the most performance out of your ads.

Wrap-up

Snapchat has emerged as an exciting and promising advertising channel for businesses.

With its extensive reach among the younger demographic and the substantial combined spending power of Millennials and Gen Z users, Snapchat offers a remarkable opportunity to grow your business.

Notably, Snapchat's cost-effective CPAs and high LTVs provide a competitive advantage, allowing for accelerated business scaling compared to other advertising platforms.

These success stories and examples illustrate the diverse range of creative approaches and strategies that can yield exceptional results on Snapchat.

However profitable they are now, Snapchat ads might not be as much in the future. Once the herd of advertisers start joining the platform and launching campaigns, the bids will likely rise resulting in higher costs.

If there was ever going to be a good time to launch your next campaign on Snapchat, it’s now.

About the author
My name is Cameron Roe. I'm the founder of NextLaunch Marketing, a marketing agency that helps ecommerce brands promote their message and improve marketing performance through automation. Let’s look at some successful examples and analyze what is about them that makes them effective.