Snapchat is now providing its influencers with detailed stats on their followers and the popularity of their content following years of calls to do so. Tens of thousands of the app’s most popular users are hence able to start analyzing their audiences, gaining insights into their gender and age breakdowns, as well as seeing a list of their interests compared to Snapchat’s average. Total content views and the exact number of unique viewers are also supported as part of the analytics platform, whereas users were previously only able to see the number of views their individual snaps or stories received while they were still live. The service will also show engagement rates, i.e. the time one’s audience spent watching their content, as well as completion rates – the percentage of people who watched it until the end.
The change should allow influencers to be much more efficient at monetizing their content and provide their advertisers with more robust performance analytics. Facebook’s Instagram has been supporting a similar functionality for years now, with that service often being cited as one of the main reasons why some online influencers were leaving Snapchat for its largest rival in recent times. The move is hence the latest step in Snapchat’s efforts to provide its most popular members with extra benefits and incentivize them to use the platform more frequently. Last summer, the ephemeral messaging service started offering verified account badges to its largest influencers.
Snap will soon be celebrating its first anniversary of going public and has a relatively rough year behind it, though its performance in the fourth quarter of 2017 was widely interpreted as positive by many industry analysts despite the fact the company ended up losing $350 million over the three-month period ending December 31. Its revenue is now on track to start outpacing its losses in the near future, largely thanks to the firm’s continued growth that saw it add nearly nine million people to its platform in the last quarter, in addition to improving its average revenue per user. The Venice, Los Angeles-based messaging service is presently in the process of rolling out its new design on a global level and should debut an entirely reworked Android app in the coming months.