Snapchat will let brands measure its ads’ impact on sales, results against rivals

One of the main reasons Snapchat isn’t yet a must-buy for advertisers is ad buyers’ inability to see how their Snapchat campaigns impact a business’s bottom line and stack up against ads running elsewhere. That’s about to change.

On Tuesday, Snapchat rolled out a program to allow third-party measurement firms to track its ads’ impact on a brand’s sales and to include that data in the dashboards that marketers use to evaluate where they’re spending their money and, of those places, where they’re getting the best bang for their bucks.

Snapchat’s marketing mix measurement program will work across all of the mobile app’s ad formats and will track campaigns’ return on ad spend, as well as sales lift. Those metrics help marketers evaluate how past campaigns impacted their businesses’ bottom lines and where they should spend their money in the future, and they are already available for ads on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

By making sales impact measurement available on Snapchat, marketers will get an apples-to-apples look at how their Snapchat investments fare by comparison. And it’s probably not a coincidence that Snapchat is rolling out this measurement just as marketers are about to head into the fall season, when they sit down with their media agencies to decide how to allocate their ad dollars for 2018.

The first marketing mix measurement firms to join Snapchat’s marketing mix measurement program are Analytic Partners, Marketing Management Analytics, Neustar and Nielsen.