TL;DR:
Snapchat Sponsored Snaps places ads directly into users' Chat feeds, the platform's most intimate and frequently used space, where 85% of users connect with close friends and family.
Chat-based advertising delivers measurable results with a 2.3x lift in brand awareness, 1.8x increase in purchase intent, and 30% more unique Snapchatters reached compared to other Snapchat placements.
Sponsored Snaps have proven to be one of the most effective ways for brands to join conversations with Snapchatters. A study with Kantar found that approximately 85% of Snapchatters feel that the ad format is "relevant to me", and "fit in with my habits on the platform.”
Successful Sponsored Snaps feel native to the platform by using casual tone, short headlines (24-28 characters), 10-second videos, and Snapchat's own UI tools to blend naturally into friend-to-friend conversations.
Table of Contents
- TL;DR:
- What are Sponsored Snaps?
- How Sponsored Snaps work
- Why Sponsored Snaps perform: The psychology of chat
- Creative best practices for Sponsored Snaps
- Measuring success and optimization
- How Later supports Sponsored Snaps strategy
- Level up your social media marketing with Snapchat Sponsored Snaps and Later
What is the power of a direct connection? For superstar DJ and songwriter Calvin Harris, it was reaching 11.8 million people with one social media campaign and enjoying a 58% boost in Spotify streams for his single "Blessings" earlier this year, thanks to Snapchat Sponsored Snaps.
Launched in 2025, Sponsored Snaps marks a fundamental shift in how brands can connect with Snapchat audiences. The Chat feed is the most intimate space on Snapchat, an environment for friend-to-friend messaging and content sharing. Snapchat has opened the Chat feed to advertisers, inviting conversation-based placement in a high-attention space.
Chat-based advertising is an opportunity to generate significant engagement and conversion returns. Industry analyst E-Commerce Bridge reported on research suggesting Sponsored Snaps provide a 2.3x lift in brand awareness and 1.8x increase in purchase intent compared to engagements on other social media platforms. For brands that can adapt their creative to fit the medium, this is a powerful tool to boost their Snapchat marketing strategy and overall social media advertising activity.
In this guide, we'll look more closely at Snapchat Sponsored Snaps and how they work. And we'll offer some tips for creative best practices and how to measure success for this exciting new social media advertising format.
What are Sponsored Snaps?
Snapchat Sponsored Snaps are ads placed directly into the Chat feeds of Snapchatters.
Per Snapchat's own statistics, the app currently has more than 477 million daily users, and nearly a billion monthly active users, a 7% year-over-year increase . Chat is the most used tab on the app, where users engage with family and friends.
Effectively, a Snapchat Sponsored Snap is a direct message delivered straight to the inbox of users identified as likely to find your content relevant and interesting.
How Sponsored Snaps work
For users, Sponsored Snaps pop up in their Chat feed, designated as an ad. Users will only see one ad in their Chat feed at a time, which prevents the whole exercise from devolving into an uncontrolled Snapchat ads Chat feed.
Tap on the Sponsored Snap to open and view. Users can also tap the advertiser's Profile icon attached to the Sponsored Snap to see Stories or open the advertiser's Public Profile. After viewing the Snap, the user is returned to their Chat feed.
Opening the Snap a second time leads to Chat, where advertisers have the option of leaving a response or providing a URL for click-through.
In the Calvin Harris campaign, for example, the Snap sent to users included a link to the full track (the Snap was a short clip of Calvin listening to "Blessings" in his studio). Users who engaged with Calvin's profile via the Snap received an automated "You like it?" message from Calvin Harris.
Users can actively clear a Sponsored Snap from their feed, or it will simply disappear when they leave Chat if they don't interact with it.
For advertisers, certain eligibility criteria must be met for content to be delivered as a Sponsored Snap. These include:
Set Ad Performance Goals to include maximizing the number of impressions, website conversions, in-app events, and app installs
Use Single Image, Video, or Story Ads (no Dynamic Product Ads)
Have a Public Profile with a profile photo
At present, Sponsored Snaps cannot be delivered to users in the European Union.
Why Sponsored Snaps perform: The psychology of chat
The Snapchat user base is massive and engaged. The app claims more than 900 million monthly users. Each user opens the app roughly 30 times a day. The app is used to send around 4 billion Snaps every day. And Snapchat's research has found that 75% of its users are on the app primarily to maintain contact with close friends and family.
This is the basis of Snapchat's finding that its users are more engaged and generally happier than the average social media user, because they are on the app to interact with close friends, not squall with strangers or catch up with distant cousins. Snapchat calls this "the power of engagement," and it's at its most powerful in the Chat feed as the most used tab on the app, regularly visited by around 85% of users.
Sponsored Snaps are an opportunity for brands to engage with Snapchatters in the space where they are most comfortable, where they trade messages with their closest friends on the app. It's an opportunity for brands to start conversations on the same basis as conversations start between friends: Share something funny, interesting, or relevant, and build from there.
Snapchat's research suggests there is a strong halo effect for advertisers on the platform that comes from engaging with users generally predisposed to be happier and more open to positive engagement. The app's internal research has found its users are 45% more likely to recommend products and 34% more likely to make purchases informed by ads seen on Snapchat compared to user behavior on other platforms.
Creative best practices for Sponsored Snaps
Chat-based advertising is still an emerging medium, but there are some recommended best practices for creators crafting Sponsored Snaps:
Headlines are crucial: The first thing the user sees is your headline. Keep it short (34 characters max; 24–28 is optimal) and engaging, and adopt a casual tone. As a general rule, use language and tone that would sound natural in a text between friends.
Keep your content snappy: Try to limit the length to 10 seconds, with focus on grabbing attention in the first couple of seconds.
Use the Snapchat UI: Keep your Snaps authentic to the medium by using elements native to the app in your content. By sharing thoughts and ideas using the same language and visual tools as everyone else on the app, your brand becomes part of the natural flow of conversation in the user's feed.
Keep content timely and relevant: Give users a reason to click and justify your brand's presence in their Chat with a time-sensitive CTA, a compelling offer, or content tied to the season or a shared cultural moment.
Deploy optional elements: Advertisers can add a branded Chat background, a custom Chat message (up to 500 characters), and an auto-response (also up to 500 characters or a video that's less than 180 seconds long).
Maintain an active and engaging Public Profile: Users can go straight to your profile from your Snap. You create a deeper brand engagement by ensuring that users who click through to your profile after viewing a Snap or Story are greeted with compelling content.
The principles all point toward the same goal: Snapchat Sponsored Snaps work best if they closely resemble unsponsored Chat elements. Authenticity is key.
The Calvin Harris campaign was set up to feel like a friend was sharing a quick idea. Users got a brief, front-facing video of Calvin in his studio, listening to music, with a simple message ("Got a new song to play you") and a link to the full track. It was pretty easy to imagine this is what Calvin sends to his friends when he has something he's excited about to share with them.
Native-style Snaps, created using the same tools and filters Snapchatters use to communicate with each other, work best for Sponsored Snaps. Support your content with a strong Public Profile on the app, maintaining fresh, relevant, exclusive content that drives further engagement. Ultimately, Snapchat ads in the Chat feed want to naturally fit the parameters of Chat: casual, conversational, built with a set of tools familiar and accessible to Snapchatters. The tone is less "now for a word from our sponsors" and more "saw this and thought of u."
Measuring success and optimization
When it comes to measuring success, Snapchat doesn't currently break out performance metrics for Chat feed placements alone. Rather, the platform treats the Chat feed placement as another placement for Single Image and Video Ads, tracking performance of those elements via its Ad Manager.
But Snapchat's own research suggests that many users essentially only use the Chat tab on the app. And running content on Sponsored Snaps delivered a 30% increase in the number of unique Snapchatters reached, compared to ads run on other parts of the app.
Snapchat counts impressions for Sponsored Snaps as the total number of times the user sees the Snap in their Chat feed. For impression-count purposes, that is defined as when the Sponsored Snap is at least 50% on-screen in the Chat feed for at least one second, or when the Snap is tapped in the feed.
As with all marketing, design campaigns with their own specific KPIs. Maximize your campaign's success by optimizing your Sponsored Snaps. Direct response advertising and Snapchat are tailor-made for each other, but only if you've crafted your content for higher response rates.
For example, Sponsored Snaps can have at least five distinct opportunities for users to click on a CTA:
In the Chat cell
Long-press on feed conversion to open the CTA
CTA in the full-screen video or image
Link in 1:1 chat
CTA when revisiting Snap for the second time
Optimize your Snaps to ensure you're fully engaging with users at each of these opportunities.
How Later supports Sponsored Snaps strategy
Social media advertising in 2025 benefits from a constant flow of innovation in the form of new apps, new functions, new content ideas, and new ways to track and measure outcomes. It can be difficult to harness the whirlwind, but that's where Later can step in to help you manage and streamline your social media marketing and advertising.
When it comes to getting a handle on Sponsored Snaps and integrating them with your ongoing social media campaigns, Later has an up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest developments in the creator economy and the tools to help you succeed.
Multi-platform coordination
It's important to keep messaging consistent across platforms while developing format-specific creative. Sponsored Snaps and other social media tactics work best when deployed as part of an integrated social strategy.
Each platform offers its advertisers tools to track campaign performance, but you have to understand how all the moving parts of your campaign are working together. Later social media management enables scheduling and coordination across all the major platforms: Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Performance tracking
Make meaningful campaign comparisons across social platforms, measure ROI, and generate reports using our centralized analytics. This enables you to track Sponsored Snaps performance alongside your other placements.
Creative asset management
Our content creation tools let you organize your Sponsored Snaps creative, keeping headlines, videos, and chat backgrounds easily accessible. They also allow you to set up and manage version control for A/B testing, and our template library helps you sort and access material for scaling successful formats.
Future-forward planning
Social media advertising doesn't stand still. Later positions brands to adopt emerging ad formats, like Snapchat Sponsored Snaps, early and effectively. We provide extensive educational resources and constantly updated tips on best practices. And we specialize in offering strategic guidance on new placement opportunities.
