Pre-filled native lead ad forms that save the customer time, and reduce cost per lead.
Snapchat, a popular messaging and social media app, has steadily focused on 1-on-1 conversations ever since its launch in 2011. Content on the platform is also optimised for authenticity, making it less intrusive and more immersive.
“Snapchat pioneered vertical video and was one of the early creators of mobile premium content.” – Social Media Today
Because of its unique format and popularity with younger generations, Snapchat is one of the world's top 10 most-used social networks, with over 800 million monthly active users in 2024.
Snapchat’s easy-to-use, interactive and fun format makes it an exciting platform for automotive lead generation. Here are 5 more reasons why:
Most Snapchat users (38.5%) are 18 to 24 years old. It’s the right time for automotive businesses to gear up and attract young users (millennials and Gen Z). These audiences have a massive combined spending power of $5 trillion, making them very lucrative.
Today’s auto-buying journey is mainly digital, with social media being one of the top 3 places used for research. At the same time, Snapchatters are interested in vehicles and are 1.5 times more likely to actively search for a car than non-Snapchatters.
You can gain more value by advertising on Snapchat. Close friends here have 4 times more influence on the audience’s purchasing decisions than celebrities and influencers.
More importantly, 63% of Auto Intenders are likely to discover, research, consider or purchase an automotive after being exposed to your brand content on Snapchat.
Snapchat’s format encourages you to create fun yet contextually relevant and purposeful content, which drives engagement from audiences.
And it shows!
92% of Auto Intenders are likely to take action after seeing automotive content on the app, emphasising Snapchat’s power to drive real-world purchase decisions.
Snapchat recognises its power in driving business purchase decisions. To that end, the app continually improves its ad platform, reflected in its earnings over time.
Recent enhancements–such as enhanced lead optimisation and cleaner signals to drive more intentional actions–resulted in an impressive 69% reduction in cost per lead (CPL).
As an auto brand, it’s the best time to capture a sizable portion of this pie by putting Snapchat on your list of top social platforms to be present on.
Snapchat’s ad platform has evolved over time, offering businesses a range of ad formats to choose from.
For lead generation ads, you need to add a CTA which redirects users to your intended destination.
Here are 3 ways you can collect leads with Snapchat’s lead ads:
You can set up your lead ad to redirect users to your website. Interested users browse the website for more information on your brand and vehicles.
With clearly visible and eye-catching CTAs on your website, you can encourage these users to share their contact details through web forms.
As an automotive business, your web form can drive leads to take specific actions, such as:
Alternatively, you can redirect users to a custom landing page built specifically for the campaign or vehicle(s).
Landing pages make it easier for users to find the information they want without browsing the entire website.
For example, you could collect leads for your latest launch–an SUV. Your Snapchat ad will direct users to a custom landing page for your vehicle. Here, you can curate information on the SUV, including the launch video, key features, specifications, expert reviews and more.
With CTAs, you can guide leads to fill out a web form within the landing page, which may have similar actions as mentioned in the previous section.
💡 Hot tip: To make the lead generation process easier and quicker, use tools like Driftrock to enable Snapchat Autofill Forms. The landing page web form is prefilled with the user’s profile information.
Find out more about Snapchat Autofill Forms.
Other than Send to Website and Landing Pages, you can collect leads more conveniently using Snapchat Native Lead Generation forms.
They are fast-loading with pre-populated form fields directly from Snapchatters’ profiles.
Since leads complete the sign-up process and submit contact details within the app, native lead gen forms help (a) decrease friction, (b) reduce drop-off and © increase conversion rates by simplifying and improving the user journey.
The example below shows how Snapchat Native Lead Generation forms work:
Here are some other ways automotive businesses use lead generation ads on Snapchat.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to build Snapchat ads with native forms to maximise your lead generation.
To start advertising on Snapchat, you need a Snapchat Ads Manager Account with admin access. This allows you to maintain complete control over your ad account and campaigns.
Use the ‘Advanced Create’ option to create an ad on Snapchat.
The next screen asks you to choose the ad objective. Click on Leads here.
You can also switch to Snapchat’s older objectives. Here, you can select Lead Generation and proceed with the following steps the same way.
Next, add your start and end dates along with the Daily Spend Cap and/or Lifetime Spend Cap.
In the following step, Enter your Ad Set Name and select Lead Form as the Conversion Location.
Set the performance goal to ‘Maximise number of leads’ or ‘Maximise number of clicks’.
💡 Hot tip: Select the ‘Leads’ adset goal to optimise your campaign for cost per lead submitted.
To set up your Bid, choose between Auto-Bid or Max Bid for each lead form submission.
If you’re new to Snapchat Ads, Auto-Bid is recommended since Snapchat automatically optimises your CPL. You can start using Max Bid once you have more insights into your CPL on the platform.
Snapchat supports location, demographic, audience, and device targeting globally.
You can choose between manually adding your location(s), uploading them in bulk, or targeting them directly on the map.
Set the Age, Genders and Languages. You can further set Household Income under Advanced Demographics.
Add Predefined Audiences (based on lifestyle interests, shoppers or visitors on Snap).
You can also create custom audiences from the various types available on Snapchat.
Select the OS, Device Makes (several brands and models to choose from), Connection and Carriers you want to target.
Under Ad Details, enter your Ad Name, Brand Name (optional) and Headline. These will be visible on your Snapchat lead ad.
To add Topsnap Media, you can either Upload a new creative or video or Browse from your existing media on the app.
Snapchat also provides several CTAs. You can choose the best one depending on your campaign objective.
When designing your lead form in Snapchat’s form builder, you have 4 key sections to fill out.
Source: Snapchat
Enter the Form Name, Lead Form Description, standard form fields and a link to your Privacy Policy.
Use custom questions to understand your leads and qualify them better.
Add the Header Image and Creative Image or Video for your lead ad.
Provide your legal disclaimers and additional consent requirements for ethical lead data collection.
Learn more about Lead Form Attachment and designing your form here.
Your campaign is now live!
While Snapchat lead ads are an exciting avenue to explore, they come with a few capabilities and restrictions to improve the ad experience for users.
We’ve listed these below:
One of Snapchat's best capabilities is the autofill feature. For quick capture, you can use form fields that prefill from the user profile (such as First Name, Last Name, Email, and Phone Number).
Instead of having your leads search for a location, you can automate the process using a postcode field or Driftrock’s Store Locator feature.
Snapchat lets you add up to 3 custom questions of different types. These categories include Short Answer, Date Widget, Multi-select and Single-select.
Adding custom legal disclaimers to your form is optional. This copy displays above the standard Snap legal disclaimer on all forms.
You may add up to two additional consent checkboxes alongside the custom legal disclaimer.
You can use Driftrock to track each lead by Source, Campaign, Ad Set and Ad.
Optimise your ads for lead submission. Features such as Driftrock's lead validation, end-to-end tracking, and reporting can help you balance volume and quantity.
There’s more you can do to optimise your Snapchat lead ads. Here are some do’s and don'ts you could follow:
Add a “Hero” message in the opening frame. This is the first message your audience will see. Make it persuasive, clear, and captivating.
Use an early offer message. It usually works best between seconds 2 and 3. Catchy CTAs can go a long way.
Find the sweet spot for your timing. Ads between 3 to 5 seconds often drive action.
Test several types of image or video ads, from video, stills, GIFs, or cinemagraphs. Then, pick the ones that worked best.
Snapchat offers a Split Test when building the ad itself. Use this feature to understand how to improve your campaign incrementally.
Explore the platform’s audience targeting capabilities– custom audiences, lookalike audiences and retargeting–to improve lead gen over time.
Align the creative with your targeting. Higher relevancy can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Spark some curiosity to get people to swipe up, but make sure you give enough context in the ad to bring in high-quality traffic.
Snapchat encourages creativity, which makes your brand memorable to younger audiences. Explore trending formats and use pop culture references in creatives.
Don’t use the same creative on every platform, making things unoriginal for your audience. Avoid generic creatives that don’t stand out from other ads.
Don’t overload your ad with images, stickers, multiple CTAs, and unhelpful distractions.
Make the most of the creative tools that Snapchat offers. They may help bring your creatives to life.
Snapchat recently upgraded its ad platform with Conversion API (CAPI) v3, which lets you collect signals in a privacy-safe manner.
When setting up your ad, you can use Snap Pixel to send events in real time to the Snapchat server. It matches web, app, and offline events to your ads for better measurement, targeting, attribution, and optimisation.
Al-Futtaim Electric Mobility launched BYD in Saudi Arabia, introducing the OEM’s new energy vehicles (NEVs) to a new market.
For the launch, AFEMC/BYD devised a Snapchat campaign to spark interest and engagement. Users could explore BYD’s NEVs in an innovative AR mall, which would make for an immersive experience.
AFEMC/BYD also launched an always-on conversion campaign to capitalise on the buzz. They targeted ads to users who previously interacted with their initial takeover and AR mall on Snapchat.
With these Snapchat campaigns, AFEMC/BYD achieved a 38% lower CPL than the industry average and a 4% uplift in action intent.
These figures suggested a positive shift in consumer behaviour, influencing potential buyers to move from awareness to conversion.
Driftrock’s automotive marketing platform is purpose-built to improve your lead generation and boost vehicle sales. Here’s how you can use it for Snapchat:
You can route Snapchat leads to any CRM or database in real time using Driftrock. Plus, you can standardise the data and integrate it with multiple sources for a holistic marketing data stack.
Driftrock also offers a central model tree and location lookup and lets you enable auto-responders and email notifications for a smoother integration process.
Automatically validate incoming lead data from Snapchat lead ads–such as email, phone numbers and addresses.
To refine lead quality, you can set custom qualification rules for lead acceptance and segmentation (for example, leads looking to buy a vehicle in 3 months).
Driftrock lets you track and measure valid leads to optimise your campaigns further. These features block invalid Snapchat leads from reaching your CRM.
Drirftrock’s safe and scalable approach automates the processes of targeting, excluding and finding Lookalikes from audience segments for your Snapchat campaigns.
Setting up CAPI and understanding how it works may be intimidating. Driftrock offers a simplified solution to improve campaign performance in a cookieless world using CAPI.
Instead of setting up CAPI individually for each platform through expensive and cumbersome development, Driftrock helps you integrate CAPI across all major ad platforms.
You can maximise event coverage as our platform maintains, monitors and adds new CAPI integrations for you.
With Driftrock, you can track Snapchat ads from first touch to purchase. Our granular tracking features let you manually and automatically optimise campaigns for vehicle purchases.
It's critical for your automotive business to respond to the leads you receive right away to increase the conversion rate.
Driftrock enables you to integrate Snapchat leads instantly and securely, automatically validating and cleansing leads before sending them to your CRM
Here’s how you can get started with Snapchat lead gen using Driftrock:
Driftrock has worked with 46 automotive brands across 12 markets to enhance sales continually. The result: Our automotive marketing platform has driven over $270 million in New Vehicle Sales in the last 12 months.
If you wish to learn more about boosting your Snapchat lead generation and automotive marketing with Driftrock, speak with our Automotive Marketing expert today.
Driftrock's integrations push lead data, pull audience records & pull conversion data.
