Snapchat Retargeting Options

Key Takeaways

snapchat ads has lots of really great targeting options you can use to reach your audience we already created a video that goes over all of those options and you can check that out right here but in that video i only touched briefly on the retargeting options that are available in snapchat because the video was already getting long and we just wanted to talk about the high level touch points but for this video i want to give a little bit more credit to those retargeting options and go through each of them so in this video i'm going to show you the four different types of retargeting audiences you can make in snapchat ads in the snapchat ads interface it's pretty easy to get to the audience builder section most of the social platforms we use function pretty much the same way nowadays over in the top left you'll see that currently i'm in manage ads but if you click on this downward facing caret it'll open up the whole menu and then i need to come over here and in the second column choose audiences so far this account doesn't really have anything going on there's only one audience in here and it's auto created and it has no users in it so to create new audiences you guessed it we need to come over to the new audience button over here on the top right when you do that you have three options custom audience look-alike and saved audience to create look-alike audiences we're going to choose custom audience and here you'll see the four main types of retargeting audiences we can use in snapchat ads i talked through these briefly in the other targeting video that i mentioned in the intro but now we're going to go through these a little bit more in depth the first type of retargeting audience you can create is a customer list you can see that you can match your customer list with snapchatters the source is either a dot csv or a dot txt file format so let's go ahead and click on customer list just like many other platforms we can now upload our files into snapchat to match to an individual user you can do that either through uploading a file or snapchat actually has a copy and paste function where you can copy and paste the data into this big field here for now just so it will all still show up on the screen i'm going to leave it as upload file one thing that is a little bit different about snapchat ads retargeting audiences is that unlike facebook or google where you upload all of the information you have about a user and you can add multiple different touch points for a user where you can upload their first name last name email address phone number all for the same user snapchat only allows you to upload one type of user information there are three different options but you can only upload one at a time so you'll see here that the formatting section says import emails phone numbers or mobile ids you only get to choose one so choose the one that you think is the most valuable if you need to download a template to understand how you need to format your data for a file upload you can either click on emails phone numbers or the mobile ad ids and it'll download a file for you to be able to review add your user information in it and make sure that it's formatted correctly once you've uploaded your file you can come down here and give it a name just the way that you would with any other audience name you then need to choose your data type you need to choose if you uploaded email phone number or mobile ad id to make sure that snapchat knows what to match to in their data set and lastly you can give it a description to help you remember what this audience is why you uploaded it what you want to use it for once you've added in all your information you can click upload down here in the bottom right as you can see i haven't done anything so i'm not going to click upload instead i'm going to click cancel but when you upload your customer lists into snapchat they have to match to at least 1 000 users or else you will not be able to use them ideally you would upload a list with more than a thousand users by a good amount probably based on the match rates depending on how well your data matches the snapchat audience database you might need to upload a list that's two three maybe even five thousand users to make sure that it matches to that 1000 user minimum so that you can use that customer audience list for now let's hop into the second audience type and that's going to be website events as you can see here you can target snapchatters based on who engaged with your website the source of that information is going to be from your snap pixel to start off you can give the audience a name whatever you want it to be and then you choose the pixel itself as you can see here we've got the name blurred out so i'm sorry for that but if you have multiple pixels tied to the accounts that you're using you can choose from this drop down and it'll let you choose which pixel you want to use right now we only have the one so that's why there's no drop down where we really get into the functionality here is we can then start to search for the interactions and we can start to create the different combinations of who we want to target based how they've interacted with our website based on our pixel tracking so if i click in here there's now a whole list that populates achievements unlocked adds billing information add to cart add clicks add views there are custom events lists viewed logins reservations saved trial starts all of these are different events that can come from your snap pixel to set these different interactions up you can either come over here to manage pixels or you can go to the events manager from the main navigation in the upper left either way you will need to set up custom events with your pixel through manual updates to your code that is not what this video is about today so i'm going to skip that part but based on how you want to target people you can utilize any of these events and then label them in here so let's just say we want to go with pages viewed and we'll click out of here and now we can target anyone who has done any of the following events right now we just have pages viewed but you can include multiple events and they're all going to be and statements there are no additional filters anything like that this is it you're combining everybody who's viewed pages made a purchase submitted a rate or made a reservation in the last 395 days snapchat unlike some of the other platforms that we use defaults to one year and one month for the date range so that's why we have 395 days it's about 13 months overall if you want it to be a shorter date range you can come in here and just adjust the date range to whatever you want it to be let's say i want it to be 180 and now the audience would only be 180 days long since this audience creation does only support the all statement or kind of any of these users and it has to include each one of these if you wanted there to be an audience that has anybody who viewed a page but did not make a purchase you would have to create separate audiences for pages viewed and purchases and then you have to target the pages viewed in your ad sets and exclude the purchases so you can't do that type of complex list building in the audience manager you'll have to do it with your targeting within your campaigns themselves for now let's hop into the third type of retargeting audience we can create which is going to be mobile app events this is going to be very similar to any of the website events that we set up it's only just going to be coming from the mobile app instead as you can see here there's no mobile app associated with this account because this is just a placeholder account we don't actually have anything in here if you haven't set up your app already you can authenticate your app right here and get all of that stuff set up in your snapchat business manager but again just like with the website option you can then name your audience choose the app itself again you won't be able to see it here but then you'll have to create a list of users from any of the specific app events here and all of these are going to look very similar they're almost identical to what they were for the website they're just going to be a couple that are a little bit different because they're app focused like we have app installs app opens that type of thing so you can create the audience lists in just the same way for your app and again you can adjust the duration to be the 13 months default or a shorter date range if that works better for you the last type of audience is one of my favorites because i find snapchat to be a really good platform for getting in front of brand new users doing prospecting list building to start to engage users with your brand and then later retarget them an ad engagement really helps us do that because users are a lot more likely to engage with your ad on that first time around rather than just going all the way to your website and making a purchase so we can leverage those audiences that we've built and introduced to the brand so now i'm going to click on add engagement which allows you to target snapchatters who engage with your ads and the source is going to be from the campaign data from your past campaigns so you don't even need to worry about the snap pixel your snap app or a source file anything like that just like with all the other audiences the first thing you can do is give it a name but the part that i really want to pay attention to is the audience definition section we can start to target people who have done any of the actions down below and the first drop down is going to be where we get to see how they engaged with our ads they either swiped up on an image or video ad completed a top snap video ad opened a story shared or saved a lens or a filter or were served a paid impression i personally really love the idea of being able to target people who were served a paid impression because that means that you actively targeted them with your campaigns and this is a way to try and track back your prospecting campaigns to see if they eventually become paid customers and see if you are targeting the right people with those type of funnel campaigns so i've chosen served a paid impression as my criteria the next thing is you get to choose the source of that event do you want it to be from this ad account as a whole do you want it to be in a specific campaign or in a specific ad set so think about the journey you're trying to take the user on messaging wise from the first time you advertise to them all the way down through the multiple subsequent steps this is going to be basically like storytelling we actually have a video where joe shows you how to do this for youtube where you can sequence your ads and create a user flow showing users specific videos based on the videos that they've already seen so this is kind of where we would try to replicate that a little bit in snapchat it'll just be a little bit more manageable so if you're utilizing the same type of messaging across the entire ad account you can probably just say in this ad account but if you have certain campaigns targeting individual users either based on their interests or behaviors or even the same thing with the specific ad set audiences that we have maybe you want to create different user flows based on that you want to create different ad messaging for it so you can choose which level of audience you want to create based on how they've engaged with your campaigns in the past for now i'm just going to say in this ad account you'll see that that audience was added down below and there's a green check mark next to it so then we can add in any other number of factors that we want to from this drop down and just like before it will simply add those new line items into this box because this is going to still be an and function if we then want to get rid of it we can click this x but for right now i'm just going to give this a name and this one i am going to go ahead and create and now we can see that that audience is in here it is populated and it has the type of engagement it's not quite ready to use yet and it's got the name associated here if you decide for any reason that you want to get rid of a retargeting audience if it's simply not doing anything for you you can click these three dots over here you can either edit it you can share it with another account or you can delete it if you want to get rid of it and for right now i'm just going to go ahead and get rid of this audience because it's not going to populate anything because it's a placeholder account it will then double check and make sure that you want to delete it and just click delete and now it's going overall snapchat doesn't have the most robust targeting options of all of the paid advertising platforms that we can use but there's quite a lot to go on in here and there's a lot of different ways that you can re-engage with users based on your customer database how they've engaged with your website or your app or even how you've targeted them and how they've engaged with your ads in previous snapchat campaigns so hopefully this gives you some ideas of how you can start putting your audiences together leveraging them in your snapchat ads campaigns and making sure that you're nurturing the users all the way through the top of funnel prospecting campaign all the way down to the bottom of funnel customer stage where they end up making a purchase thanks for watching our video if you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to get notified of when a new one comes out be sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel you