As Snapchat continues to battle against their biggest rival Facebook, the camera company has announced a new location – based feature that will allow businesses to see whether people will go to their stores after seeing an advertisement.
The new product by Snapchat is called snap to store. It primarily looks at the number of people who will visit a store within one week of seeing an advertisement posted on Snapchat’s vertical mobile ads.
So far, according to Adweek, Wendy’s, 7-Eleven, and Paramount Pictures have tested the new location-based ad. In fact, Wendy’s released a new type of geo-filter to help promote their new chicken sandwich and thanks to Snapchat’s advertising product Wendy’s was able to encourage 42,000 people to visit the restaurant during the seven-day period.
“Foot traffic into our restaurants is the best measurement of short-term sales success for any program,” Brandon Rhoten, Wendy’s VP and head of advertising, media and digital, told Mashable. “Snap to Store is a big win for Wendy’s for this reason — we want more adtech like this.”
Following the test and pilot program, Snapchat is launching a dashboard where advertisers can analyze and review data about their advertising on the social network platform. The dashboard will calculate the number of visitors and demographic information such as age, gender, and region.
But Snapchat is looking beyond just advertising and plans on using their location-based technology to create new features for users on the social network platform. For example, by using location data, the company plans to add new categories based on the new site data.
What about privacy? Snapchat claims it only uses location data when people open the app. Moreover, Snapchat will only aggregate data from at least 1000 users and then break them into different categories such as Jim’s restaurants or other types of venues.
Snapchat has found success in their vertical advertising products. For example, according to Snap, when craft release sponsored lenses that overlaid a macaroni cheese and cheese graphic on top of photos purchases of macaroni and cheese increased by 13%. Also, Gatorade created an advertisement that links to a game where users could play tennis against Serena Williams and approximately 14.5% of users swiped to play the game.
This news comes after Snapchat parted with McDonald’s to allow for snapshot users to apply for a job using a McDonald’s lens.