Case Study: Snapchat Banner Ad

The cheapest and best performing ad unit in mobile advertising is the humble 320x50 banner. The mobile leaderboard is sometimes the most frustrating to design for because the space is limited and the small size makes it easy to ignore. The messaging really needs to be succinct in order to effectively get your point across.

As a Creative Strategist during my time at Liftoff, I conducted many creative A/B tests and established several best practices that could be applied to specific ad sizes and/or app verticals. In tests conducted for social media apps like Facebook and Instagram, I discovered that simply adding animated profile pictures to banners could increase installs dramatically. I applied the same hypothesis in this experiment conducted for Snapchat for ads running in Mexico:

Why did this work?

For social media apps, what attracts users to install the most is the potential to meet or reconnect with other people! Other tests included animating in filter choices, bitmojis, and other graphic elements but profile pictures always performed better.

Did this work in other regions or for other app verticals?

Yes! Though when conducting this experiment in different countries like India, localizing the profile pictures to match the population of the region performed better.

Aside from social media apps, profile pictures in banner ads also performed well for dating apps.