Snapchat has always been terrible at analytics, only showing daily Story view counts that content creators had to screenshot just before they disappeared every 24 hours in order to prove their worth to sponsors. But starting today, tens of thousands creators who make official Stories or have large followings will start seeing a slew of view count and demographic analytics on their Snapchat profile.
These new analytics include:
- Total Story Views in the past week, month and year to date.
- Time Spent Viewing Stories in minutes in the past week, month, and year to date.
- Daily unique story viewers, average time unique viewers spent watching, and completion rates
- Audience demographics like gender breakdown, top age bracket, and top geographic regions
Audience interests like which lifestyle categories like film and TV, food, fashion , and sports their audiences care about
The new analytics could help creators show their total reach to secure sponsored content and product placement deals, refine their posts to match their audience, and compare their following to that on other platforms. A truck company might not care if a creator has 200,000 views a day, but if they can show those views come from men age 25-34 in the Midwest who like the outdoors, the business could pay $50,000 for the creator to feature their trucks in their Snaps.
It appears that Snapchat is changing its ways following CEO Evan Spiegel’s strategy flip-flop on the Q3 2017 earnings call when he said “We have historically neglected the creator community on Snapchat . . . In 2018, we are going to build more distribution and monetization opportunities for these creators.” Snapchat wasted a lot of time, considering I wrote about “Who will be the first Snapchat Stories celebrity?” back in 2013 a week after the feature launched, and creators like Mplatco (whose art is featured above) have been getting paid by brands like Disney since 2014.
