"Snapchat is growing up"

Following an abysmal earnings report in May, Snapchat has added a feature that will allow targeted users to click through to an advertiser's site after viewing an ad.

"Snapchat has realized that unless it offers the hygiene factors of online advertising, it will not be able to play with the established ad platforms," explained Faisal Sheikh, chief digital officer of Starcom Myanmar. "All the new features on offer by Snapchat already exist and frankly without them, most advertisers would have stayed away from the platform."

Previously, Snapchat would only measure campaign success on views and impressions, relying on Millward Brown for data on brand lift and intent to purchase after the fact. Now with links, brand marketers and agencies will be able to place UTM links with their Snapchat campaigns and measure much more, attaining a higher level of campaign attribution in the process.

In a bid to quash the replicative nature of Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat rolled out more visual features including voice filters, geolocation filters, backdrops. and an opt-in Snap Map.

"We follow the Sasha Strauss approach towards brand strategy and believe that brands help people tell stories about themselves," said Danish Ayub, founder of MWM Studioz. "Dining at Sattar Buksh and posting pictures of the coffee and friends allows people to communicate their popularity and social circle. So with geo-filters, we look forward to helping our HoReCa clients create branded filters based on the outlet's customers are at and snapping selfies from anyway. It remains to be seen if we can merge the location based marketing feature with the geo filter to retarget past visitors within the Snapchat app. In any case, we are excited that Snapchat is growing up."

Businesses that rely on footfall would find Snap Map of particular interest, as it purports location-based marketing capabilities, relying on users to willing opt-in for their friends to know where they are and gravitate towards social gatherings with high traffic.

"Any social media digital challenger, and that includes Snapchat, by nature has to break the Facebook hegemony to create shareholder value," expressed Habibullah Khan, the director of content at penumbra. "All Snapchat updates need to be seen in this context. While links is an important update to keep pace with Facebook and Instagram by evolving Snapchat from a walled garden to something more hybrid so advertisers feel baseline parity, we feel Snap Maps is a big deal. The visceral fun nature of Snapchat combining with Snapchat's network effects if enough users opt in, hold fascinating and immediate impact for advertisers esp around location-based marketing. We feel Facebook will not copy this feature as it is above their risk threshold."