Snapchat is opening itself up to advertisers of all sizes with new buying tools

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

If you wanted to advertise on Snapchat a couple of years ago, you had to be willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on custom campaigns.

Now the app’s parent company, Snap Inc., offers several ways to easily advertise through more than a dozen partners that help sell its inventory, which ranges from video ads to sponsored geofilters. Starting this June, Snap is going a step further by flinging wide its gates to advertisers of all sizes and budgets with a new suite of self-service tools.

Releasing a self-service ads manager is intended to erase any friction that may be keeping advertisers off Snapchat, a company spokesperson told Business Insider. The move could also help considerably grow Snap’s fledgling ad business, which is expected to reach $1 billion in revenue this year.

Snapchat’s new ads manager will let any advertiser buy, manage, and view reporting for their campaigns. All ad formats, including app install ads, geofilters, and video, are available alongside goal-based bidding and existing targeting capabilities. The tool is free to use and requires no minimum ad spend.

A new mobile dashboard will also allow marketers to see their ads like a normal user, view analytics, and get notification updates about their campaigns directly from the Snapchat app. Over 20 brands are testing these new tools now as part of a private beta, and Snap plans to make them available to everyone in June.

Snap

A screenshot of Snapchat’s new ads manager.

“90% of the stuff we would want is all there,” Ameesh Paleja, the CEO of mobile movie ticketing app Atom Tickets, told Business Insider in an interview. “You don’t need a lot of training to start using it.”

Atom Tickets, which is headquartered down the street from Snap in Santa Monica, California, has been testing the app’s new ad manager over the past several weeks. Paleja said his company has purchased campaigns in Snapchat already and has been impressed with the targeting capabilities Snapchat offers for reaching people interested in certain activities, like going to the movies.

“These guys have made it brain-dead easy, which is awesome,” he said, noting that Atom plans to spend more on Snapchat with the new self-service tool. “They hit a home run.”

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