What is Snap Advanced Conversion?
Snap’s Advanced Conversions is a data collection, analysis, and reporting process that provides quality advertising services and conversion reports while respecting user privacy and the growing restrictions surrounding data tracking. Its strategy and how it works make it particularly promising compared to other solutions (or lack thereof) that are currently offered by platforms that previously relied on third party data for advertising.
Advanced Conversions was officially launched in 2021, But its features and capabilities are being regularly updated and updated. Despite its infancy, it has already gained some controversy and is often referred to as the snap method of “bypassing” iOS data tracking opt-outs. The idea that Snap Advanced Conversions “skirts around” data opt-out and tracking rules is available throughout the media, but it does not paint a very accurate picture of this new feature and what it actually does.
It’s important for investors, advertisers and users alike to have an idea of how advanced conversions work. This article is a good starting point if you are one of the above, and will cover:
- A simple summary of what Snap Advanced Conversions is
- A simple explanation of how advanced conversion works
- Important upcoming developments and updates
- Take a deeper look at why these developments are important
How Advanced Conversion Works, in Snap’s own words:
Snap explains advanced conversion in three steps:
- Vague impressions and conversion data so that it can no longer be traced to a recognizable account or user
- Combining these data and sorting them into groups that are useful for ad optimization and reporting using peer analysis
- Repeat steps 1 and 2 on a daily basis. Reports are delayed by 36 hours to prevent real-time attacks and make results less traceable to a specific user or account.
This sounds straightforward, but to make things clearer, let’s break down those three steps in a much simpler way.
How Snap Advanced Conversion Works, Complete Breakdown:
The best way to understand how Advanced Conversion actually works is to compare it to traditional ad optimization and reporting to understand what is being avoided and addressed. The goal of every digital advertising platform is to provide businesses with ad placements that result in clicks, conversions and sales. Data is the key to doing this.
So now, the question for digital platforms like Snap is: How can we bring results to businesses that not only bring in data, but without the invasion of privacy that ad optimization and reporting previously relied on?
Step 1: Disable personally identifiable data from Snap and advertisers
Snap Advanced Conversions fix this by shifting focus away from accurate, user-identifiable data and focusing on meat and potatoes instead of what advertisers were first looking for: Groups and patterns in data that are useful for insight So they’re not randomly showing ads to uninterested people, they know where their ads are going, and what clicks they receive.
To do this, advanced conversions rely on two sets of data: Impression data (First party data from Snap) and Conversion data (First party data from advertiser). This data contains information identifiable by nature – mostly first party data. However, Snap blurs these two datasets separately so that:
A) Impression Data does not provide the advertiser with any identifiable information from Snap users,
b) Conversion Data does not provide Snap with any identifiable information from advertiser conversions and subscribers and
C) Identifiable information from both sets may not be combined for use in advertising optimization and reporting, or will not be accessible to any outside company.
What does “obscure data” mean and how does it ensure personal privacy?
User data that makes you recognizable as an individual or by your device are email addresses, phone numbers, and IDFAs (such as a tracking number for an Apple iOS device specifically for advertising). Means vague information processing This piece of information makes it incomprehensible and unusable So that they are not connected or used in any way in the next step.
This is equivalent to black bar data by modifying sensitive details in a document before handing it over to someone else. This ambiguity prevents Snap from learning what its users are doing on other sites or apps, as well as advertisers. Because the data sets are vague Before When analysis is never done, potentially bad actors cannot simply “decode” this obscure data in analysis and reporting, because the information was never part of the equation when they were created and was not obscured as an integrated dataset.
Step 2: Gather the remaining information to find useful patterns, groups, and features
Now obscure datasets are now assembled and Divided into different groups with common features. These general features are very important and help to create the same conversion report that advertisers and businesses are familiar with, and Advertisers can reliably give insights into how well their campaigns have performed.
It cannot and will not, however, give them any insight at the user level. In other words, it’s all aggregate data that never goes unnoticed for an important campaign metric for Snapchat advertisers to draw a good picture of their audience.
You can think of it as a buyer personality – it’s based on a wealth of information about the right, detailed, real people, and you can use it to get real results when trying to reach them. You can even compare it to your familiar customers, but you can’t separate it to find specific people behind all these informative insights.
Step 3: Continue this process every day, 36 hours after the information is reported to the advertiser.
This is the delay For privacy reasons only, Makes it difficult to try and draw insights into real-time user activity and conversion reports. This delay is also a protection against any external entity trying to do the same thing in the event of an attack.
The current limitation of Snap Advanced Conversions
Advanced conversions were updated a few months after launch in 2021 to allow advertisers to see a small portion of real-time analysis, but It takes 36 hours to get a complete report from the advanced conversion process. This 36-hour deadline is not entirely accurate, though Snap recommends waiting ~ 72 hours before making a decision.
This is by far the biggest flaw in the system for advertisers – Delay is not only frustrating but also confusing for those who are not used to it.
For example, a delay may result in CPX (cost per “___” metric) initially showing much higher than the advertiser’s highest bid. Even later Complete 36-hour delay. The actual metrics become more accurate after a few days of daily analysis and full reporting, but any advertiser who does not read this note on Snap’s advanced conversion information can lower their maximum bid in response and damage their own campaign in the process.
If advertisers find some relief in lowering the CPX metrics a few days later, they may be a little disappointed that their returns are also reduced – ROAS and the first few days suffer the same initial over-projection and become more accurate within the same 72-hour period.
It also makes any A / B test difficult, At least if you’re trying to do it in a timely manner. You can’t rely on any assumptions or modeling statistics; The system currently does not provide any.
For all of the above, Snap quickly decided to include a snippet of real-time analysis for advertisers as they waited for the full report to begin. Still, be patient with hard-to-ask advertisers accustomed to real-time reporting from third-party data, especially when platforms with tons of personal first-party data don’t have to ask them.
Upcoming updates and developments
Snap leaves details of their upcoming development fairly vague: Advertisers should expect a “more comprehensive, real-time view” of the resultss – but no word other than exactly when In early 2022, And they left this note with “more information to come”.
What we do know is that they’re trying to fix a major bug in the Advanced Conversions delay, and we know exactly how they plan to do it: Transformation modeling, a process for providing assumptions that do not currently exist.
While an innovative process for reporting advanced conversions that isn’t perfect now, it still has a good track record of delivering promised launches and updates. If we use that credibility to make any predictions about this near-future update, it is safe to say that the month in which the update is released for further conversions will be exactly what was promised; The system solves some of the growing pains, and perhaps the next big win for Snap.
Why you should keep an eye on Snap’s development
Traditional ads on most digital platforms rely heavily on third party data to find the most suitable audience and track important aspects of a campaign’s performance, such as impressions, conversions, and click-through rate (CTR). This has caused problems for many large platforms as the use of cookies and other data tracking methods has begun to decline. This is a pillar of discussion in the digital economy, you will have a difficult time No. Read about it in the business media.
Lack of adequate data for advertising due to opt-out policies such as the iOS14 update has led to general frustration from businesses that rely on these platforms for their advertising revenue, share value, and their advertising campaign.
The consensus is to abandon its use altogether for the sake of first party data, but this is another problem: it is not widely available anywhere.
Some platforms have lots of automation, such as Amazon or TikTok, because of how the platforms work and the permissions users have given them to access them. However, a common social media platform does not do that. In other words, For companies like Meta or Snap, there’s no way to deliver the same quality advertising by switching third-party data to first-party data in their traditional reporting and optimization systems.
They cannot rely on third party data they already have. Personal preferences, interests and even basic information such as emails are subject to change, which makes most third party data unreliable unless it is fresh and regularly updated.
For companies in this predicament, There is no ideal alternative solution in place To save their advertising, aka their main source of income and key platforms for free use. As a result, many are choosing to develop their own solutions internally (read: scrambling) according to their resources and needs.
Due to the changing nature of first-party data and the changing landscape of social media, advertising is unlikely to be a widely accepted method for optimization and reporting, if ever. But The company that manages to find the best way to deliver reliable advertising that the business has become accustomed to will win big As we approach the inevitable death of third party data advertising – as long as advertisers and investors are not waiting too long, that is.
According to Snap, they don’t have to; Unless they insist on waiting for the metavars.