Snapchat Ads Vs. TikTok Ads: Which Is Better For eCommerce Advertising?!

Key Takeaways

hey there it's savannah sanchez from the social savannah today i'm going to be talking about what platform is better for your ecommerce business snap or tick tock so a bit of background i've been working with both these platforms for many years now so for snapchat i used to work in an agency where i led the facebook and snapchat media buying teams so i've been working with snapchat for over two years for e-commerce ad clients and at the social savannah where i consult e-commerce businesses for the last year and a few months now it's been um a lot of my clients have tested and seen snapchat work really well and then for tick-tock it's definitely a newer platform but i've started with tick tock ads to my clients back last april and i've seen some great results for my clients on tick tock as well for clients including kitsch our place thrive market blend jet sugar bear hair so lots of experience with both platforms and a common question i get is if i was to start brand new whether on snap or tick tock which one should i test first and which one is getting the lowest cpas so i'm going to go through the pros and cons of both platforms and ultimately what my suggestion is for e-commerce brands that are looking to expand away from facebook and google and are wondering what's the best next platform to test so the first platform i'm going to talk about is snapchat so if you guys are no stranger to my youtube channel i have plenty of tutorials and videos about how to set up your snapchat ad campaigns so make sure to check those out but i'm going to go first and say that one of the best things about snapchat is the low barrier to entry to start advertising on that platform the ads manager is extremely simple to navigate and it's really hard to screw up and for lack of a better word in terms of if you choose broad targeting you upload your creatives and you can easily sync the pixel with the snapchat shopify app it's really easy to set up your first campaign and get launched right away there's a lot of basic best practices with snapchat in terms of using ugc or user generated ad creatives using target cost bidding as well as leveraging broad audiences but ultimately snapchat is a very simple to use platform with very low barriers to entry to get started or as composed of tick tock can be a bit more complex especially if you are trying to get an agency managed account so if you were to be one of my clients the way that we set up with tick tock is that we have to go through a tick tock representative so that they set up the ad account internally they have to set up a line of credit often and it often could take a couple of days to get started to get the pixels set up or snapchat if you decide that you want to start advertising on snapchat today you can get started in the matter of minutes upload your credit card have your campaign and get ready to go i would say one of the biggest benefits of snapchat over tick tock is just the low barrier to entry to get started another one of the main advantages of snapchat over tick tock is that they have more placement opportunities on snapchat so they have the regular video story ads but you can also advertise in the discover feed and buy a discovered feed tile with which i've seen those ad placements have been extremely successful for my clients you can also run dpa or dynamic product ads as well as collection ads on snapchat so these are all placements that i know tick tock is either developing or is currently testing but as of now snapchat has more placements which means more opportunities to show your ads to the people who care about your business another great thing about snapchat is that it's really easy to get started in terms of just taking your existing facebook ad creatives especially your ugc ad creatives that you've tested on instagram stories and pop them over to snapchat i've seen that even though ugc of course is going to be the best creative content for snap and it is ideal to make content specific for snapchat that is very ugc focused i still had a lot of success with my clients where we take their instagram stories and test them on snapchat and again that's just gonna make the setup on snapchat so much easier if you can already leverage your 9x16 facebook ad creatives right on snapchat alternatively on tick tock i would highly recommend against running your instagram story or facebook creatives on tick tock because they will not work when i first started with a few tick tock clients i tried the same strategy of i would take what was working on facebook instagram stories and snapchat and try to test it on tick tock and it was a complete flop it is so important to make specific creatives for tick tock leveraging tick tick-tock influencer styles transitions trending text it's so important with tick-tock ads that you make it look like an organic tick-tock and stay current with the trends if someone senses that it's an ad and you're just putting your instagram story ad on tick tock people aren't going to engage with it and they're going to swipe right by so when i work with my ecommerce clients on tiktok pretty much all of our focus is to get the right creatives for that platform this means we're reaching out to tick-tock influencers as well as making our own creatives that we film in-house that feels extremely native to tick-tock some of the best comments that we've gotten on our ads for our clients on tick-tock was people saying that this is the best ad they've seen on tick-tock and it doesn't feel like an ad and this is how you do tick-tock advertising right so in short snapchat is a lot easier to get started on the creative front because you can take your existing instagram stories and test it on snapchat however tick tock is going to take you a little bit more to get started because you have to have the right creative styles for tick tock one of the other advantages of snapchat over tick tock is that snapchat has much greater retargeting capabilities so you can upload a custom audience to snapchat whether by emails or phone numbers and snapchat will try to match that audience to snapchat so you can retarget people based off of custom audiences you can also retarget people based off the website pixel so once you install the snapchat app you can retarget people who have been to your website add to cart or purchase if you want to retarget your existing customers on tick tock retargeting is basically non-existent right now for my clients on tick tock we're fully focused on prospecting only and not utilizing tick tock's targeting capabilities for retargeting since they're so limited at the moment so that is one major advantage of snapchat is that you do have the ability to retarget existing website visitors and add to carters off the pixel or tick tock does not have the ability to retarget off of pixel events quite yet another benefit of snapchat over tick talk is that snapchat does have more robust attribution so on snapchat you can look at people who have purchased based off of the default 28 day swipe one day view window but you can also see other view windows such as one hour swipe one hour view seven day swipe one hour view seven day swipe three hour view there's a ton of combinations down to the hour of how you can track attribution on snapchat now with ios 14 coming about anytime now it's not sure if these attribution settings will say the same on snapchat but for now snapchat has a very robust attribution dashboard where on the other hand tick tock you can only see conversions that happen on the same session so that means that in order for tick tock ads manager to show you that someone add to cart purchase they have to click shop now on the tick tock ad and make that action right then within tick tock's browser essentially so i like to call this first click attribution if you're trying to compare tick tock's attribution to what you might see in google analytics what's great about this is that what google analytics reports is exactly the same as you'll see on tick tock ads manager since it's all recorded on that same session attribution window but especially if you have a product that maybe takes a bit more consideration perhaps it's a higher average order value maybe over 50 dollars it's really hard to see the journey of whether someone's coming to a tick tock ad and maybe has gone to their mobile phone browser or has gone to the website directly or went on their computer later that day or later that week and purchased you won't be able to see that same user journey as you would on facebook and snapchat as you do on tick tock the attribution window is extremely limited now to counter this attribution challenge for my clients i like to install a post-purchase survey i like using one called inquire on shopify and essentially this will ask people how do they hear about us after they purchased and they can click facebook snapchat tick tock we can list all of our platforms i like to compare how many tick tock purchases that tick tock ads manager is reporting versus what we're seeing on the post post-purchase survey of how many people are self-reporting that they purchased because of tick tock so another benefit of snapchat over tick tock is that snapchat is offering a very substantial credit to new advertisers so as a snapchat ambassador i'm able to offer my followers a spend 2k get 2k deal so i put that down in the description essentially once you spend your first 2 000 on snapchat they'll match that 2 000 where i used to have a really great coupon for tick tock it was free 2300 but that expired back in february so you missed the boat on that one if you aren't watching my older tick tock ads youtube videos often my clients i'm also even able to get more credit for them to get kickstarted on their ad campaigns so if you're thinking about snapchat ads definitely get in touch and i can see if i can get together additional credit for you to launch your campaigns if you decide to work with me on media buying and ad creatives so although i've been saying a lot of great things about snapchat there is one major benefit of tick tock over snapchat that i have been seeing as of lately the main benefit of tick tock at the moment is that i'm seeing much lower prospecting cpas on tick tock than i am on snapchat so that means that my cost per purchase on tick tock for a new customer is substantially lower than what i'm seeing on snapchat at the moment now i think that this is a combination of a few things number one the cpms on tick tock is cheaper than snapchat there isn't as many competitors in terms of advertiser competition in the auction on tick tock so you're going to be able to take advantage of cheaper cpms right now the way that i'm measuring attribution is i'm often looking at ga or google analytics reported attribution for snapchat versus tick tock and often when i'm spending the same amount on prospecting for snapchat versus tick tock i'm seeing more revenue attributed to tick tock and new purchases coming through from tick-tock i'm also comparing the results like i mentioned before on post-purchase surveys to see whether people are recording tick-tock as their main reason for purchasing or snapchat so if i'm being completely honest i'm much more excited about tick tock right now for prospecting new customers because i am seeing much lower cpas and ultimately that's what i want for my clients is for them to get the lowest cost per purchase possible and to find platforms that we can scale on other than facebook probably your next question is how much skill is there on tick tock i think it's pretty easy if you're spending over a hundred thousand dollars on tick tock ads to get anywhere from 20 to 50k spend on tick tock within your first month of advertising i have some clients that are already spending between 50 and 100k on tick tock within their first month it's really going to come down to your ad creatives which is why i mentioned i spend so much time on getting my clients the best greatest for tick tock making sure that our ads are staying on trend because your creatives are going to determine whether you seek success on tick tock i've seen tick tock be especially good for low aov products so products that are under 50 like i said you can only measure attribution on tick tock's ads manager on that same session conversion window so you want to make sure that people are impulse buying so it's really important that you have a low aov product that you're advertising on tick tock otherwise attribution is just going to be that much more difficult to measure how many new purchases are actually coming through on tick tock another thing i'm testing for my clients is that we're often putting special tick tock promotions on our tick tock ads so we'll say use code tick tock for 25 off your first purchase we really want to encourage tick talkers to get off of tick tock and make that impulse vibe so putting an extra coupon code exclusively for tick tock can really seal the deal to summarize my entire thoughts of snapchat versus tick tock i do think that tick tock right now is better for prospecting and for getting lower cpas with the exception that you have to have the right creators for tick tock in order to make that platform work if you don't want to get the right creatives for tick tock and invest in working with tick tock creators then i would recommend going to snapchat because then you can easily just take your existing creatives from facebook and put it on stem so what are your thoughts on snapchat versus tick tock have you been testing these two platforms for your clients or for your business i want to hear about it in the comments below so let me know what you think and if you like this video make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe and share it with a friend thanks so much for watching