We Tested Snapchat Geofilters and All We Got Were These Lousy Analytics
Okay, so the title is admittedly a little dramatic. Yes, the analytics Snapchat currently offers for On-Demand Geofilters are pretty lousy, but the test was actually pretty successful.
The Goal & Plan:
Our goal was to simply gain awareness among our target audience through the use of a custom Snapchat Geofilter.
Members of our team were attending and speaking at Mozcon, a popular digital marketing and SEO conference. But beyond just our physical presence, we wanted a way to reach as many people, digitally, at the conference as possible.
The 1,500 people who attend Mozcon just so happen to be our exact target audience: representatives from enterprise brands who might choose to hire our agency and digital marketing professionals who might choose to join our team.
We decided to test using Snapchat On-Demand Geofilters to reach them.
The Details:
(To learn how Geofilters work and how to set them up, Buffer has an easy-to-follow guide here.)
The design of the filter had to be strategic. Blatantly using our logo and name just isn’t our style and doesn’t incentivize anyone to use it. It needed to be contextually relevant.
And to help foster some good old fashioned FOMO we decided to hit on two things we knew attendees would need their friends to know:
- They were at Mozcon
- They were in Seattle
We used our primary brand colors (turquoise, purple, and orange) and our name subtly displayed in the bottom corner.
When you create On-Demand Geofilters as a brand, Snapchat briefly displays your name over the filter before it disappears so users know it’s sponsored by a brand. Next time we might choose to skip using our brand name in the design itself since Snapchat already does it for us.
Three other brands capitalized on Snapchat Geofilters at Mozcon. Moz (understandably), one other agency (Wallaroo), and a marketing SaaS company (Unbounce). You can see examples of Snapchat’s brief brand disclaimers on their filters here:
Snapchat On-Demand Geofilter Analytics: Our Results
The two reporting metrics you get for On-Demand Geofilters are Views and Uses.
- “Views” means someone has seen your filter when scrolling through filter options for a particular snap.
- A “Use” means they posted the snap with your filter to their story or sent it directly to a friend.
Did we accomplish the goal we originally set out to achieve?
Yep! We had a total of 5.1k impressions over the 3 days we ran the filters. The filters were used 138 times. All of that for a whopping $161. Not bad!
Data I wish we had:
Unique Impressions: number of unique impressions of the filter / our brand
Unique Uses: number of unique uses of the filter / our brand
Use Reach: how many impressions were gained from those uses? If someone has a lot of followers and posts our filter to their story, we get even more impressions and more value. If someone has one follower, and it’s her mom, we get less impressions and less value.
Benchmarks: what’s a standard impression to use ratio for sponsored filters
Would I recommend brands use Snapchat Geofilters?
If you’re looking for awareness among a hyper-relevant audience, yes (but be strategic about where and when you use filters).
If your brand hasn’t taken the dive into maintaining its own Snapchat account but want to test the waters, yes (you still gain awareness for your brand via the platform but don’t have to maintain an account and post Snapchats regularly).
If you’re looking to test something and have a couple bucks to blow, sure.
If you’re looking to take advantage of an inexpensive way to reach an audience, yep!
If you’re attending an event and you anticipate attendees will use Snapchat to document it, yes!
