Seamlessly Connect Snapchat Ads to Power BI for Real Time Analytics

The birth of the digital world originated from social networks. If you can rewind a little, you would see how social network platforms have become a predominant driver in every sector.  Several social network platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are business and brand accelerators today. Snapchat is one such social network platform that is accepted as a creatively powerful platform for different kinds of businesses. 

At face value, it might appear as the selfie app for teenagers, but Snapchat enables connectivity with niche groups of people for sharing ideas and is packed with features. Snapchat users are amazed by its fun-engaging face filters, chatting with their loved ones, sharing snaps, watching stories, and many more. With a casual vibe to it and a widespread reach, it is an excellent social network platform for sales or advertising. 

Power BI, on the other hand, has its own merits for robust Business Intelligence and Data Visualization. A Power BI Snapchat Integration can be fruitful for businesses to optimize advertising as well as handle data analytics promptly. This article details particulars for the same. 

What are Snapchat Ads?

Snapchat Ads is a marketing ad campaign that you can create by adding some engaging content and building some eye-catching elements for interacting with snapchatters. Well, this powerful platform is used preferably by marketers to build brand awareness and to interact with young target audiences. These ads are unlike television ads, and they contain a variety of ad objectives, target audiences, demographics, and budgets.

From a business perspective, Snapchat Ads design three objectives that are essential. These three objectives are as follows:

• Awareness: Awareness is intended to increase your branding. This means making your brand reach wider.
• Consideration: Consideration indicates approaching the potential customers to drive them over your website or collect some qualitative leads or make users install apps. 
• Conversion: Conversion refers to the automation of your sales, and convincing the target audience to take action.

Let’s have a look over the key features of Snapchat Ads for a better understanding:

Key Features of Snapchat Ads

With a look at these fascinating features of Snapchat Ads, you will have an idea why marketers are crazy about using Snapchat Ads.

1. Effective Targeting Options

Before approaching any digital marketing strategy, you must know who is your target audience. Snapchat Ads offers target options that you can use to pass on your product or service to the correct audience. These targeting options are: 

• Interests & Behavior: Targeting options help to study the user’s interest over Snapchat or outside Snapchat.
• Demographics: Targeting the users based on their age, gender, income, etc.
• Location: Targeting the users based on their location like country, some specific address, or within the mentioned radius.

This method requires Cohort Analysis for effective application; a detailed guide for implementing it is available for reference.

2. Snapchat Ads Types

Snapchat Ads grants a wide range of advertising formats depending upon your business requirement. You can choose any ad format to showcase your products and drive them to the landing page. The ultimate top 3 types of ad format meant to be efficient and effective are:

• Snap Ads: This is the most preferred ad format that is in the form of full-screen videos, GIFs, or animation. This type of ad provokes the viewer to take instant action like installing the app or viewing the website. 

• Product Ads: With this ad category, you can upload your product catalog or service catalog. It’s more likely to lead to a straight purchase if the viewer is willing to purchase.

• Web Ads: Web Ads refer to the feed with the swipe-up arrow, hovering so that the viewer clicks on it. After swiping up, the user is on that particular website and can check engaging offers.

3. Cost-Effective Ads

Previously, using Snapchat Ads for running campaigns was a bit expensive. It has a limited budget set with high charges applicable. But now Snapchat has changed its game. You can create engaging ad content within a pocket-friendly budget. Snapchat extends Snapchat Ad Manager which acts as a self-serving tool. It is offering a video creation tool for you to be able to create instant ads.

What is Power BI?

Microsoft’s Power BI is an effective Business Intelligence and Data Visualization tool specially meant for organizations to view the actions taken by the users or viewers over their products and services. It is a suite of Business tools to observe the analytics, measurements, and store data in a form of metrics sourced from different resources. Since its inception, the business organization can generate reports, and dashboards to gain insight into the conversions. 

There are specifically two types of Power BI solutions. One is the Power BI service which is a cloud-based SaaS solution. Microsoft hosts Power BI service securely over the cloud so that organizations can view reports, and dashboards through websites or mobile apps.

The second is Power BI Desktop, which is a free application that can be used for Data Analysis and to authorize the reports. It can be installed only on Windows OS. You can integrate multiple on-premise data or cloud data to get interactive dashboards and aesthetic visualization. Data Analysts and Data scientists use Power BI to generate dashboards and update them over the Power BI service.

Key features of Power BI

Let’s understand some key features of Power BI:

• Analytics: The best feature that Power BI offers is flawless analytics which means gaining insight into the traffic driving over the website or application. Some additional updated element included is Q&A supporting arithmetic operations and some smart easily referrable previews. A guide for setting up Sales Dashboards in Power BI is available for reference.

• Scaled Reporting: The amazing feature which enables detailed report generation with proper labels, layered order, visuals, selection of charts, proper mobile authoring reports, availability of bookmark option, and many more. A comprehensive guide for Power BI Report Server is available for reference.

• Responsive View: Sometimes accessing presentations, and reports on mobile phones compromise responsiveness. But with Power BI, you will get to view enlarged navigation trees on both iOS as well as Android platforms. You can zoom in or zoom out the reports or graphs so that every piece of information is visible.

• Excellent Services: Power BI serves plenty of services, the ultimate one offering quality visuals. Here, Excel considers the dataset integrity during pivot connection. After analyzing Excel, you can download the Excel file. 

• Data Connectivity: Power BI comprises connectors that connect with the cloud data. This helps the businesses to view the metrics or the visuals easily. The connector is directly connected with the data source. Once the connector fetches the data, you can create some interactive visuals.

Benefits of Using Power BI

Here are some key benefits of using Power BI:

• User-friendly Interface: With a drag-and-drop interface and pre-built templates, Power BI is accessible to both technical and non-technical users, making it easy to analyze and visualize data.
• Interactive Visualizations: Power BI offers rich, interactive visualizations that allow users to explore data insights with customizable dashboards and reports, enhancing data storytelling.
• Seamless Integration: It integrates easily with various Microsoft tools like Excel, Azure, and SQL Server, providing a smooth experience for users already in the Microsoft ecosystem.
• Real-time Data Access: Power BI supports real-time data streaming, enabling businesses to monitor critical metrics and make decisions based on up-to-date information.

Prerequisites

• Active Power BI Account
• Active Snapchat Ads Account

How to Implement Power BI Snapchat Integration?

Integrating Snapchat Ads with Power BI enables the organization to check out if its marketing strategy is working. After this integration, it will be easier for the organization to decide or apply changes over the growth.

• Method 1: Power BI Snapchat Integration using Manual CSV file Exchange
• Method 2: Power BI Snapchat Integration using Hevo

Method 1: Power BI Snapchat Integration using Manual CSV File Exchange

Integrating Snapchat Ads with Power BI isn’t a difficult task. It is divided into two simple steps. You need to follow these two simple steps and then be done with the integration. Follow the steps below to integrate Snapchat Ads with Power BI:

• Step 1:  Export Snapchat Ads data from Snapchat Ads Manager as CSV files
• Step 2: Import CSV Data from Snapchat into Power BI

Step 1:  Export Snapchat Ads data from Snapchat Ads Manager as CSV files

Power BI performs analysis based on the provided dataset. The dataset is in the dot CSV extension. So first, you need a dataset in CSV format. You can get this dataset by exporting the custom report. A customer report details the information of the Snapchat Ads data metric for a particular time duration.

To export this custom report, follow the steps below:

• Step 1: Switch to the Snapchat Business account, and click on Log in to Ads Manager. 

• Step 2: At the top menu, from the dropdown click on ad account.

• Step 3: Then over the same menu, click on the Manage Ads option.

• Step 4: Select any one out of Campaigns, Ads set, or Ads.

• Step 5: Click on the Columns to extract the required details in the CSV file.

• Step 6: Click on ‘Download’. Select a particular Configuration like CSV, PDF, etc.

• Step 7: Select CSV, and Click on Export.

The downloaded file contains the selected columns stored as an Excel file.

Step 2: Import CSV Data from Snapchat into Power BI

To generate reports or to create Data Visualization graphs, the dataset must be imported into Power BI. Once you have the downloaded CSV file, import that CSV file from Snapchat to Power BI.

Follow the steps below to import CSV Data into Power BI:

• Step 1: Download and Install Power BI Desktop Windows Application (32-bit or 64-bit) If not available.

• Step 2: Open the Power BI Desktop Application.

• Step 3: Click on Home, and then Select Get Data present on the top left.

• Step 4: On Selecting Get Data, a dropdown will appear.

• Step 5: Click on Text/ CSV.

• Step 6: A Dialog box will appear, switch to file explorer, and select the CSV file that is to be imported.

• Step 7: Click on Open. After Selecting Open, Power BI asks for some additional data attributes like the number of rows, file origin, and delimiter type.

• Step 8: Once finalized with the file attributes, click on Load. You will get to see the entire table with defined columns. 

Thus, you have successfully imported the CSV file into Power BI.
You can now perform any actions on data like generating reports, creating interactive visuals, etc.

Limitations of Setting Up Power BI Snapchat Ads Integration using CSV Files

While connecting Snapchat Ads data with Power BI using a CSV file, you might face some challenges. These are as follows:

• Time-Consuming: Although, importing CSV into Power BI is the easiest one to perform for developers, but is time-consuming. The Snapchat Ads data must be huge, and to load such a huge dataset is time-consuming.

• Degrades Performance: Once the data is imported into Power BI, it slows down the system. After some time, the system stops responding and hangs a lot. This degrades the performance.

• Difficulty in Updation: A lot of manual work is required. If any changes are suggested by the client or customer, then you need to update the data to change the dashboard or report. This is difficult as it requires manual changes to be done in a spreadsheet.

• Insufficient Data Type: Sometimes, CSV files might not support data types like null data or missing data. This might be a problem when it is imported into Power BI. 

Method 2: Power BI Snapchat Integration using Hevo

Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline. It supports pre-built data integrations from 150+ data sources, including Snapchat Ads. Hevo offers a fully managed solution for your data migration process to a destination of your choice. It will automate your data flow in minutes without writing any line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture makes sure that your data is secure and consistent. Hevo provides you with a truly efficient and fully automated solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data for visualization in Power BI.

Hevo focuses on three simple steps to get you started:

• Connect: Connect Hevo with Snapchat Ads and all your data sources by simply logging in with your credentials.
• Integrate: Consolidate your data from several sources in Hevo’s Managed Data Integration Platform and automatically transform it into an analysis-ready form.
• Visualize: Connect Hevo with your desired destination and visualize your unified data easily to gain better insights.

Let’s look at some salient features of Hevo:

• Fully Managed: It requires no management and maintenance as Hevo is a fully automated platform.
• Data Transformation: It provides a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to transfer. 
• Real-Time: Hevo offers real-time data migration. So, your data is always ready for analysis.
• Schema Management: Hevo can automatically detect the schema of the incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
• Live Monitoring: Advanced monitoring gives you a one-stop view to watch all the activities that occur within pipelines.
• Live Support: Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.

Explore more about Hevo by signing up for a 14-day free trial today. 

Conclusion

In this article, you learned about Power BI, its key features, Snapchat Ads, and its key features. You also learned two easy steps for implementing your Power BI Snapchat Ads Integration. You were also provided with a list of prerequisites for the same.

A detailed guide on integrating Stripe with Power BI is available, along with resources on HubSpot Marketing Automation for further insights.

Integrating and analyzing data from a huge set of diverse sources can be challenging, this is where Hevo comes into the picture. Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline helps you transfer data from a source of your choice in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code repeatedly. Hevo with its strong integration with 150+ sources & BI tools, allows you to not only export & load Data but also transform & enrich your Data & make it analysis-ready in a jiffy.

Get started with Hevo today! Sign up here for a 14-day free trial!

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