Last June, Snap launched Dynamic Ads, a new e-commerce offering designed to help brands grow their online business by simplifying the consumer purchase journey and driving measurable ROI – especially at a time when the Covid-19 lockdowns got many businesses to quickly expand their e-commerce efforts in response to consumer demand. Shayan Rahimi, Head of e-Commerce – MENA at Snap, tells Communicate what they bring to the table.

What exactly is Dynamic Ads and how does it work?

Dynamic Ads is the latest product offering to feed-based transactional businesses, providing a number of benefits to various industries, including e-commerce, retail, travel, finance, online services, and entertainment.

The objective of this product is to drive scalable performance by uploading a product catalogue directly to Snapchat’s Ad Manager, resulting in the creation of thousands of dynamically built Snap Ads that showcase a wide product range and competitive pricing.

You can then use Snap’s sophisticated algorithms for both prospecting and remarketing to target the right user at the right time, which will help achieve the desired performance marketing goals across web or app. This will allow e-commerce platforms to acquire new high-value customers, showcasing their unique propositions to the market, cross-selling and upselling their product range.

There is no minimum spend and anyone can test it out today!

What kind of marketing approach does it fit best?

The most advanced advertisers approach Snapchat with a multi-product, full-funnel strategy. Dynamic Ads is an amazing way to supplement always-on performance campaigns to drive incremental ROI and scale.

Using this product specifically, both prospecting and re-engagement objectives are achieved when building campaigns by creating subsets of the product feed to reach the target audiences with a category-specific approach (Electronics, Beauty, Fashion, etc.). This enables advertisers to focus on achieving higher gross merchandise volume (GMV) and increasing the volume of orders across focus areas of their businesses, yielding the best results during the initial launch phase of Dynamic Ads.

What are Snap’s recommendations for brands looking to use this format?

Dynamic Ads helps brands diversify and expand their ad reach and provides advertisers with several benefits, including:

• Improved return on effort: Dynamic Ads help cut time spent manually creating ads by simply syncing a catalogue, selecting an audience, and letting Snap’s system build the ad in real time. As changes to products occur (i.e. price or availability), the ads will adjust accordingly so advertisers can truly run ‘always-on’ campaigns.
• Increased ad relevance: By dynamically building ads from product catalogues, we’re able to greatly expand the set of ads that are created. With a larger pool of ads to choose from, our system can serve more relevant ads to users based on their demonstrated preferences. This will improve the end-user ad-viewing experience while simultaneously increasing advertiser ROI.
• Access to a coveted audience: The MENA region has grown to 34 million monthly unique Snapchatters. Snapchat reaches over 90% of 13-34-year-olds in Saudi Arabia, and over 60% of 13-24-year-olds in the UAE.

Why is Dynamic Ads launched now in the region?

The performance industry, and more specifically e-commerce, have been a global focus for Snapchat over the last three years. Our product teams have continuously surprised us with innovation and speed in which they bring new products to the market, exceeding the advertisers’ expectations and their return on advertising spend (ROAS) targets.

Dynamic Ads is our latest product for this industry and we’re grateful for a wide range of clients who are heavily invested in maximizing the potential of Snapchat’s performance products and have already adopted the new solution.

We launched Dynamic Ads with the aim to drive even better results during Ramadan, a key moment in the MENA region for e-commerce advertisers, and to be prepared to test, learn, and innovate to scale further across the Back to School and Black Friday sale periods towards the end of 2020.

The arrival of Snapchat’s Dynamic Ads supports this e-commerce momentum and helps advertisers in MENA to automatically create globally-served Snapchat ads in real-time, based on product catalogues that can contain hundreds of thousands of products which can be served in multiple international markets.

How is this format being received in other markets and how does Snap expect it to be received here?

The e-commerce penetration in MENA is still underdeveloped by most international standards. With the accelerated digital transformation and higher e-commerce consumer adoption rates over the last three months during the lockdown, we anticipate an even higher e-commerce penetration this year and a further revenue contribution to retail across the region, catching up with more developed markets, like the US and Europe. Dynamic Ads will be a core growth catalyst in helping to scale online revenue penetration in MENA for retailers.

We expect digital first and omnichannel players across the MENA region to continue achieving amazing success due to the adoption of this product, and scaling their ROAS as they continue to operate in a highly competitive landscape.

What is Snap’s strategy to push e-commerce and how does this new ad format fit into it?

E-commerce is a core pillar to our growth strategy in MENA. The market leaders and the wider industry in this space have already seen amazing results, building relationships with consumers at scale with our brand suite and driving exceptional lifetime value (LTV) and ROAS with our performance products – Ounass increased their ROI on Snapchat from 9x to 12x in the first two weeks of launching Dynamic Ads.

Dynamic Ads will be the foundation of advertisers’ full-funnel approach on Snapchat. Automating asset creation will help them scale revenue as more users come online to shop and connect with their favorite e-commerce platforms to find the products they need and love.