Snapchat’s new tools let brands see how well geofilter ads are performing among users

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Snapchat has rolled out new tools for marketers, called Snap to Store, allowing brands to see how well geofilter ads are performing among users. They’ve been testing it with a handful of brands since last year, including Paramount Pictures and 7-Eleven. The firm is now looking to expand Snap to Store to a wider range of brands from the retail, fast food, movie and automobile sectors.

Brands can take advantage of Snapchat’s new proprietary digital dashboard to measure whether their ad campaigns on the service actually drive users to specific stores, restaurants, movie theaters and other places of interest.

“We recently developed our own Snap to Store measurement product using the location-based features of the Snapchat application to determine the increase in store visits after viewing an advertising campaign,” the company noted in its S-1 filing.

The filing offers the following example:

Wendy’s blanketed its U.S. stores with Sponsored geofilters that promoted the Jalapeño Fresco Chicken Sandwich. We used our Snap-to-Store measurement methodology to report that the Sponsored geofilter drove over 42,000 incremental people to a Wendy’s location within seven days of viewing the Sponsored geofilter.

The Snap to Store product basically leverages sponsored geofilters that users apply to their snaps taken, say, in a restaurant to track whether friends who saw their snap, as well as those who didn’t see the original snap, visit the same restaurant chain.

Armed with this data, a restaurant owner is able to determine if their advertising campaign has made any difference in driving shoppers into the restaurant. Wendy’s is one of the first brands to track how Snapchat ads drive people to its locations.


Snap to Store diagram from Snap’s S-1 regulatory filing.

The tool is available free to advertisers who reach a certain spending threshold with Snapchat. The company didn’t specify what that spending threshold is.

In its current form, Snap to Store is somewhat limited.

Because Snapchat doesn’t collect data when people visit stores—nor does it plan to share any specific individual user location data with advertisers—marketers who would use the Snap to Store product must rely on the users who would specifically open the Snapchat app at a given location and post a Story with a sponsored geofilter.

Rival Instagram announced today that its own Stories feature now has more daily active users than Snapchat.

Snapchat is available free on App Store.

Source: The Wall Street Journal