Snapchat ads: who they serve, and who they do not

The five previous articles in this series explain how to use a platform. This one exists first to decide whether to go there at all, because in most cases the answer is no and nobody has an interest in telling you.

That is not a judgement on the platform. It follows from two things: its audience is concentrated in a narrow age band, and it works privately — most of what happens here happens between friends, out of reach of a business.

There is nonetheless a handful of trades for which this is the best spend in the pillar, and one format with no equivalent anywhere else in this series: the only one where your customers distribute your advertising, free, because they find it entertaining.

So we will proceed in the reverse of the usual order: first what the figures allow us to say and what they do not, then who this serves, then who it does not, and only afterwards how to use it.

If your customers are over thirty, this platform is not for you. That is not a targeting nuance, it is a question of presence: the people you are looking for do not open the application.

If you sell to businesses, it is also no. No professional buyer consults suppliers here, and there is no mechanism on this platform that would make that possible.

If your product requires a long decision — property, insurance, industrial equipment, expensive training, building work — it is no again. The register here is ephemeral and fast, and that register is incompatible with a decision taking three weeks.

If your monthly advertising budget is modest and already committed elsewhere, it is no once more, for the reason set out further on: the real spend is not money but the attention of whoever handles it in your business.

We refuse to sell this platform in those four cases, and we say so before the quotation. It is the easiest line to add to a proposal — "and we will cover Snapchat too" — and it is the one that produces the most spending with no result we have encountered.

The article on TikTok explains that production value is a negative signal there. Here that rule is stricter still, because the context is not public entertainment but a conversation between friends.

A sharp, framed, lit and retouched image looks foreign here. What fits is what resembles what people send each other: a photograph taken just now, text handwritten over it, a ten-second video filmed without preparation.

That has a practical consequence for who makes the content. It is not agency work: it is the work of somebody in their twenties who uses the platform every day and knows codes that change every three months.

If you have that person on your team, this platform may be your best spend. If you do not, having somebody who is not on it imitate the register produces a result that is recognisable immediately, and the word for it is awkward.

It is the only platform in this series where we regularly recommend not entrusting production to us. An employee posting badly but naturally will do better than an agency posting well but from outside.

On this platform almost nothing you make stays. Posts disappear, so do conversations, and an account left inactive for three months is not a dormant account but one that no longer exists in practice.

That separates this channel sharply from the rest of the pillar. An advertising account accumulates a history that lowers your costs; an address list can be handed on; a published article answers for three years. Here, none of that.

That means there is no asset to accumulate here, unlike an advertising account’s history or an address list. You are building nothing that can be resold or handed on, which is one more argument for going only if the mechanism genuinely suits you.

The only thing you can carry away is a list: the people who wrote, what they asked for, and a number. Copy it somewhere else, into a file you own, as the article on Facebook advertising recommends.

One practical habit follows: whatever worked, photograph it at the moment it is working. You will not be able to find it later, and a screenshot is the only possible archive here of your own work.

What we will refuse: selling this platform to a business whose customers are over thirty, that sells to other businesses, or whose product requires a long decision. Those three refusals cover most of the requests we receive for this channel.

We will also refuse to add this platform while the previous one is not being held. If your messages are already waiting more than an hour elsewhere, one more presence does not produce customers: it produces one more queue, and we would be billing for it.

We will refuse to quote an Algerian user count for this platform, because we know of none that is dated and checkable, and to produce content from outside when nobody in your business knows the register — the result is recognisable immediately.

What we do, when the conditions are met: a geofilter designed to be carried rather than to inform, set on a place and a date where people already photograph themselves; an agreed code written down at the counter; the accounts in your name; and a contact list copied elsewhere, because nothing here persists.

And what you should do without us this week: take your last ten sales and write down the approximate age of each buyer. If half are over thirty, you have just saved a quarter of spending, and this article has done its job.