Lower-funnel focus: Why Snap has partnered with ROI Hunter
Snapchat has partnered with ROI Hunter, a product performance management tool, as the social platform aims to help ecommerce marketers find “actionable product insights”.
Parent company Snap is the third ad platform integrated with ROI Hunter alongside Meta and Google. These additional capabilities will, Snap said, drive better results for retailers.
Currently managing over $2bn in paid adspend, ROI Hunter touts itself as the largest platform globally for managing product performance. Its technology provides retailers with real-time product performance analytics.
The partnership will initially be live in the UK, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Analysis: MMMore tools to help advertisers prove ROI
Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel made it clear on 1 August that the company’s focus would be on “really driving performance for advertisers” over the coming months.
Spiegel spoke on Snap’s Q2 earnings call, after shares had plummeted by 20% in response to weaker-than-expected revenue and profit guidance for the rest of the year. That was despite a return to profit (Ebitda) and double-digit growth in revenue.
The more pessimistic outlook is largely driven by weaker adspend by important business sectors such as “technology, entertainment and retail”, according to chief financial officer Derek Andersen.
More than two weeks later, Snap’s share price has failed to rebound, as the graph above shows.
While Monday’s announcement is unlikely to change that, it does provide weight to Snap’s ambition to become a more valuable media platform for marketers’ return on investment, as opposed to simply providing a place to market to hard-to-reach Gen Zers, for whom Snapchat remains popular.
Lower-funnel performance
Spiegel went on to say: “One of the most important things, especially as we look at brand spend in the back half [of 2024], is the relationship between brand spend and lower-funnel performance. And I think some of the most sophisticated advertisers are really leveraging full-funnel solutions because building that brand awareness is really important in terms of improving overall conversion rates on the lower funnel.”
Which is where ROI Hunter enters the chat. Snapchat will look to help advertisers better measure their return on spend, with its own first-party tools or by providing information for advertisers’ media mix modelling or multi-touch attribution reports.
It’s also notable that the announcement with ROI Hunter is of limited scope in the UK and the Middle East. Whether this is a trial ahead of a global roll-out or part of a wider effort to bring more performance measurement for Snap advertisers remains to be seen.
‘Volatile’ brand advertising on Snap spooks investors despite SMB progress
Podcast: Does Snapchat want to be a destination for news? With Snap’s Lucy Luke