Adobe has been a market leader in its industry for years, but the brand needed to explore new ways to reach its target audience through paid social tactics. On Snapchat, Adobe previously focused on Single Image & Video Ads (Snap Ads) and Collection Ads. Expanding into new placements as they became available on Snapchat was necessary to target relevant new users, but a risk if performance did not meet expectations.

Throughout our long-term partnership, Bamboo always looked for new ways to diversify the channel mix and test out the newest platform features to stay ahead of competition. When Snapchat Story Ads launched, Adobe and Bamboo knew testing into the format was crucial for continued growth on the platform.

The team started to understand and monitor performance, reducing risk by not impacting the performance of their historical Snapchat campaigns. On the creative side, the Bamboo team worked directly with Adobe’s design team to meet best practices for Snapchat Story Ads. 

During the testing phase, Story Ads had a budget share of 15% and an impression share of 25%, suggesting that Story Ads have the potential to reach a larger audience on Snapchat and drive higher engagement.‍ Seeing these early results, the team scaled up testing to understand if this could be a sustainable placement moving forward. 

Story Ads proved to be a more cost-effective ad placement option than Snap Ads, with a higher conversion rate. They also helped diversify Adobe Creative Cloud’s existing roster of ad placements, leading to better engagement and audience reach. Story Ads drove significantly higher Return on Marketing Spend than Snap Ads while accounting for at least 30% of spend.

Through testing and expanding Story Ads, examining the impact on ad performance, and understanding the benefit of diversified ad placements, Adobe was able to achieve: 

• 49% decrease in CPMs (compared to Snap Ads)
• 73% decrease in CPCs (compared to Snap Ads)
• View-to-purchase conversion for Story Ads outperformed Snap Ads by 6x