17 Snapchat ad examples (and why they work)

Snapchat is an exciting new advertising channel that you might want to consider using for your business. The platform reaches 75% of all 13-34 year olds in the US and continues to grow each and every day with more users joining around the world.

In the US, the direct spending power across Millennials and Gen Z users on Snapchat is a combined $1 trillion. This is a huge market opportunity and opens up a lot of possibilities for growing your business. With cheaper CPAs and higher LTVs, you can maximize your profit margin to scale your business much faster than other channels.

There are countless ways that “Snapchatters” express themselves on the platform. When you’re approaching your ads, it’s important to know what’s working in the market and how people will engage with your content.

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 examples of successful Snapchat ads and analyze what is about them that makes them effective.

Domino’s

The popular pizza brand Domino's used Snapchat 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 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 Bank

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

BACARDÍ was looking to reach Snapchatters in their 20s throughout Germany to strengthen brand awareness. They produced a Lens experience to allow 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 audience through Snapchat’s variety of placements, they were able to increase the purchase intent of BACARDÍ products.

Sephora

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 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

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

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

What made their simple image 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 ads helped drive a sense of urgency to download and use the app.

Coca-Cola

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

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 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

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 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

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

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 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, Video Ads, AR and Lens experiences. The benefit of using Snapchat is that you’ll reach a younger 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.

Snapchat won’t always be this profitable however. 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.