Snapchat Ads Tutorial 2026: Ultimate Guide for Beginners

Did you know that Snapchatters are 34% more likely to buy a product from a Snap ad compared to other platforms? With a reach of over 900 million users every single month, and 75% of those users being between the ages of 13 and 34 years old, Snapchat ads offer some of the lowest ad costs and strongest conversion rates, all while targeting one of the most valuable demographics online. So whether you're just starting out or you're scaling an established brand, Snap Ads has all of the tools that you need to get your ads in front of the right audience. In this step-by-step tutorial, you'll set up your Snapchat Ads account, install the Snap Pixel on your website, use Snap's built-in creative tools to create your ad, and you'll launch your very first campaign. By the end, your campaign will be live, optimized, and ready to bring in conversions. To get started, click the link at the top of this video's description to create your Snapchat ads account. That link also unlocks a special offer. You'll get a $375 ad credit after you spend $350. So, with our special link, you can instantly double your campaign budget. Once you're ready to sign up for your account, click on the yellow get started button here. And once you get to this page here, just go ahead and fill out your personal information. And once you have everything filled out, go ahead and click on next. Now, go ahead and enter your username. And then here you're able to fill in your website. And if you have import brand assets checked on right here, Snapchat will actually take the assets from your website and autopop populate them onto your Snapchat ads profile, which can save you some time. So go ahead and enter your website here and then click on create account. Now, if you'd like, you can add a profile photo here and you can also fill out your bio. I'm going to leave this empty for now and I'm just going to click on confirm to move on. Here you can add more of your business details like your country, currency, and phone number. Once you've done that, go ahead and click on next to move on. And here you're able to take advantage of that special offer I mentioned earlier. Make sure you have the spend $350 get $375 deal selected. Then click on next to move on. And now with all of that done, you've successfully created your Snapchat ads account. And once you do that, you'll be brought to this page here where you're able to create a campaign, but we'll do that a little bit later on in the video. For now, let's go to the bottom left here and click on back to manage view. Let's start by getting familiar with the Snapchat ads interface. To navigate to a different part of your dashboard, go to the top left of your screen, then click on this little drop down arrow here. Now, we're inside the main dashboard. Let's quickly break down what each of these tabs does so you know where to find everything when you're building your ads. We'll start on the lefth hand side here with the advertise tab. This is where you'll create and manage all of your ad campaigns. You'll spend most of your time here when you're launching and optimizing ads. The next up, we have the assets tab. This holds all of your core tracking and targeting tools like your pixels, custom audiences, and product cataloges. Then we have the creative tab. Here you'll find your ad creatives and Snap's built-in tools for building videos and AR content. You can easily edit, manage, and reuse your creatives from this section. Then we have the analyze tab. This is where you can track your results, view reports, and run split tests. Then we have the develop tab. This is for more advanced tools like AR lenses and custom development. And if you're just getting started with Snap Ads, you can skip this for now. Then lastly, we have the business tab. This holds all of your business and account settings like billing, team members, and public profiles. Now that you know your way around, the next thing we'll do is set up the snap pixel. This will track what people do on your website, help Snapchat optimize your ads, and it lets you build better retargeting and lookalike audiences. So, let's head over to the pixels tab here, and we'll click into it. Then go ahead and click on create pixel. We'll first have to give our pixel a name. So I'll name mine test and then I'll click on create. Now I need to link my pixel to my ad account. If I hover over this box here and then I click into it, you'll see my ad account appear here. This is automatically created for you whenever you signed up for your Snapchat ads account. So yours should look something like this with your business name. Let's go ahead and click on it to link it to our pixel. That was done successfully. So, let's go to the top right here and click on setup pixel. And here we can set up web events. These are the actions that Snapchat will track on your website like page views, purchases, and signups. And using these two different options, we can install the snap pixel to your website. The first option here is pixel code. This lets you manually install the snap pixel on your website by copying and pasting the code into your site's header. And the more common option here is partner integration. If I go ahead and click into this here, you'll see all of the different integration partners that are available with the most common ones being Google Tag Manager, Shopify, and Big Commerce. Just click on the platform that your website uses and follow the steps and this will automatically install the Snap Pixel for you. I'm not actually going to be connecting this pixel to a live website for this tutorial. So, I'm just going to click on cancel here in the bottom right. And now let's jump into creating our first campaign. To do this, let's head to the top left here and click on the drop down arrow again. And we'll click on create ads. Next, let's choose our campaign objective. As you can see here, there are five different types of objectives to choose from. So, let's quickly break down when you'd want to choose each one. The first one here is awareness and engagement. If you just want to get your brand or product seen by as many people as possible, this is a good option, but it won't focus on driving clicks or sales. The next objective is traffic. Use this if your goal is to get people to visit your website. It's great for getting eyes on a product page or a landing page. Then we have leads. If you're trying to collect emails, phone numbers, or form signups, this is what you'd choose. Then we have app promotion. If you have a mobile app and you want more people to download and install it, this is the option that you'd go with. Then lastly, we have sales. If you want people to buy something on your website or take an action that leads to a sale, this is the best option for my demo campaign throughout this video. I'll just go with the first option here, which is awareness and engagement. I'll go ahead and click on it here to select it. And then I'll go to the bottom right and click on next. Then here we have two different choices for our campaign. We have automatic clicks campaign and manual build. And even though Snapchat recommends automatic, this is designed to use data from your past campaigns. Since we have a brand new account, there isn't any data yet. So, we'll go with manual build to help Snapchat start learning about our campaigns. And later on, once you have results, you can use the automatic clicks campaign if you'd like to. So, for now, we'll go with manual build. I'll click on it to select it and then click on next. Now, let's go ahead and give our campaign a name. I'm just going to name this test campaign. Then, as you can see here, the status is automatically set to active. I'm going to go ahead and turn this off for now, just in case there's any issues if the ad gets rejected or delayed. But once it's approved, we can easily just turn it back on. Then we have create split test. I'll go ahead and enable this to show you how it works. If I scroll down here, you'll see that there's different test variables that you can choose from. You can split test between creatives, audience, placement, and goals. And this is really helpful if you're within that testing and experiment phase with different campaigns. For my test campaign here, I'm going to go ahead and disable this, though. Now, let's take a look at our start and end date. You'll want to make sure that you never set your start date for the same day that you're creating your campaign. Always set it for the very next day. This will give your ad plenty of time to get through the approval process. So, I'll set it for tomorrow. and then I'll go to the bottom right here and click on next. Okay, so we've now created our campaign. We'll now move on to creating our ad set. This is where we'll choose things like our budget, targeting, and ad placement. Basically, all the stuff that controls who sees your ad and how it's going to run. You can start by giving your ad set a name if you want to. Again, I'll just name this test ad set. And once again, the status is toggled to active by default. I'll just go ahead and turn this off like before, just in case if there's any issues with our ad getting approved. Then we have our tracking information. Here is where you'll attach your snap pixel. As you can see, I'm getting this error here because I didn't fully set up my pixel before. And if you're getting this error, just go ahead and click on setup pixel to fix that. Then we also have snap app ID tracking. This is mainly used for mobile app campaigns. If you're promoting an app, you'd use this to track installs and other inapp actions, but we won't need it for this campaign. Now, if I scroll down, we can choose our goal and bid information here. Let's choose our performance goal. If I click on this drop- down arrow here and then scroll down so I can see everything, you'll see that there's different types of performance goals. This basically tells Snapchat what kind of results you want from your ads. Whether that's getting more views, clicks, or impressions. Which one you choose depends on your campaign and what you're trying to achieve. So just pick the option that lines up best with your goal for your ad. In my case, I'm just going to try to maximize the number of impressions that my ad is getting. So I'll click on the first one here. Then I'll go ahead and close this up and then we'll click on bid. Bidding is essentially how much you're willing to pay for each result, like a click, video view, or an impression. Auto bid lets Snapchat automatically figure out the best price for you. And I would recommend this when you're just getting started. Max bid is for when you want to set a specific amount yourself, but it's a bit more advanced. So for this campaign, we'll go with auto bid. And I'll go ahead and close the drop down here. Again, now let's move on to budget and schedule. When you're first starting, I recommend setting your budget to at least $30 a day. This gives Snapchat enough room to show your ad to enough people and go through its learning phase so it can figure out who the best audience is. So let's set our budget to $30 here. And when it comes to scheduling, again, make sure you set your ad to start the very next day, not the same day that you're creating the campaign. And also, I would recommend letting your campaign run for at least 4 days. This again will give Snapchat enough time to properly learn and optimize your campaign. And doing this will also set up your future campaigns for more success. Now, let's take a look at ad placements. By default, Snapchat will use automatic placement, which means that your ad will show up across all parts of the app. But if you click into this here and then click on edit placement, you can scroll down and choose where you want your ad to be shown. For most campaigns, I recommend just leaving this on automatic, but if you're running a really specific type of campaign, you can always adjust your placement here. So, for now, let's click on automatic placement. I'll close the drop down here. Next up, we have locations. This controls where your ads will be shown. If I click on search locations here, let's say for example that I also want my ad to appear in Canada. Here I'll click on Canada and make sure it's the country. And now my ad will be shown in both Canada and the United States. So make sure you choose the locations that make the most sense for your business and where your ideal customers are. And if you already have a list made of locations in bulk, you can go ahead and upload those here. Next, let's move on to demographics. This is where you'll choose your audience's age range, gender, and language. Just make sure to match this to what makes the most sense for your business. Like, for example, if you're operating within the beauty niche, you might want to target a more female audience. Or if your product is meant for a certain age group or language, you can set that here. In my case, I'll just make sure that I'm targeting an Englishspeaking audience. So, I'll click on English here. Next, let's scroll down and check out our audience settings. And we'll first take a look at the predefined audiences. This type of audience is an interestbased or behavior-based group of people that you can target. Like for example, later on in this video, the ad that I'll be creating will be targeting people that own dogs. So if I click on this here and type in dog, I can select dog lovers here. And this is going to show my ad to people that own a dog. If you're looking for something a little bit more targeted though, you can create a custom audience. To do this, click on create Now, let's take a quick look at the different types of audiences that you can create and when you might want to use each one. Let's start with the customer list. This allows you to target your existing customers by uploading an email or a phone list. This is really good for retargeting past buyers. Then we have website events. This will target people who visited your website or taken actions on it like viewing a product or making a purchase. And it pulls this information from your snap pixel. Then we have mobile app events. If you have an app, this lets you target users based on actions that they've taken inside your app. And then we have ad engagement. This will target people who've interacted with your past ads, like watching your videos or swiping up. And then we have profile engagement. This will target people who've visited or engaged with your public Snapchat profile in the past. And then lastly, we have lookalike audience. This will reach new people who are similar to your best customers or website visitors. but you will need an existing audience to create a lookalike audience. So, whenever you're creating a new audience, just make sure it lines up with your campaign objective. You want to make sure when you're creating a campaign that you know who you're trying to reach and what action that you want them to take. I won't be creating a full custom audience in this video. So, for now, I'll go to the right hand side here and click on cancel. Now, let's scroll down the page a bit more and take a look at the devices. If you're looking to target users who are using a specific type of device, you can do so here. For this campaign, I'll just leave everything here as default. And then I'll scroll down and take a look at the delivery settings. The first option we have here is frequency cap. This just lets you control how often a single user can see your ad. And then we have third-party tagging. This and double verify are more advanced tools for tracking and verifying your ad's performance, but most beginners don't need to worry about these. So, with everything done here, let's go to the bottom right and click on next to go ahead and finalize our ad set. Okay, so now we've created our campaign, we've created our ad set, and now it's time to create our ad itself. We'll start by giving our ad a name. I'll just name this test ad. And we'll take a look at our ad format. Here we have a few different types of ad formats to choose from. So, let's quickly break down each of them to understand why you would want to use them. First up, we have the single image or video ad. This is great for quick promotions, offers, or driving traffic. I would aim for six to 10 second videos to get the best results here. Next, we have the story ad. This is a series of images or clips that will show up in the discover feed. This is great for product demos, storytelling, or deeper engagement, and it's one of the best formats for beginners. Then, we have the collection ad. This lets you showcase multiple products with a swipeable carousel. This is really good for e-commerce brands with several items to feature. Next up is the commercial ad. This will play as a short unskippable video. This is really good for brand awareness or polished promotions. It works best when you have a high budget and highquality creatives. Then lastly, we have the AR ad. This is an interactive lens or a filter that users can engage with. These are much more advanced than the previous ad types, and they're really great for bigger brands or campaigns with higher budgets. For this video, we'll be creating a story ad. With story ad selected, let's scroll down here to ad creatives. This is where we're going to build and create the ad that our audience is going to see. And we'll be able to preview it live here on the right hand side. Let's start by uploading our first piece of media. To upload my media, I'll start by clicking on the upload button here. And from here, I can upload my first video tile. Since I'm building a story ad, I can add in multiple tiles to my creative. And each tile is basically a piece of my story. It'll be an individual video or image that plays in sequence as my viewer taps through my story. For this ad, I'll be uploading two video tiles. To upload my first one, I'll just double click on it. That file will be uploaded and you'll see it appear here on the right hand side. If you want to preview your ad, just take your mouse and hover it over the video here on the right hand side and it'll begin playing. Now, let's take a look at our attachment on the lefth hand side here. It's currently set to web view, but there are a couple different options. I can choose between web view, deep link, or app install. Choose which one matches your campaign's objective the best. And in my case, this will be web view. So, I'll just go ahead and click on that. Next, you can enter your website URL. I'll click on this here, and I'll simply type in my website. Now, let's scroll down and check out our call to action. This is super important because it's telling your viewer what you want them to do. Right now, my call to action is currently set to view, but there are plenty of different options to choose from. For this demo ad I'm creating in this video, I'm running a dog grooming service, and I'm looking to book appointments. So, I'm going to go with a book now call to action. So, I'll click on book now. Now, I want to add in my next tile. So, I'll click on add assets. Then, I'll click on duplicate previous asset. So, that way my call to action and website URL stay the same. Let's go ahead and click on that now. Then I'll scroll down and simply delete this media here. I'll click on upload once again. Click on this to navigate to the correct folder. And then I'll upload my second video tile. It will go ahead and be uploaded here. So now if I take my mouse and I hover over my video here, I can go between the two different tiles by using the arrows. This allows me to preview what my ad is going to look like when it's live on Snapchat. This is really helpful to make sure that your ad is appearing the exact way that you want it. I'm happy with how my video looks here. So, I'm going to scroll down and configure a few more settings. Let's start by giving our ad a headline. In my case, I'll just name this dog groomer near you. I can scroll down to my public profile settings here. I can choose whether this is a partnership ad. I can also see how my public profile will look here. Scroll down to the discover tile settings. I would recommend just leaving this turned on. It allows your story ad to show up in the discover feed, which will help more people see it. However, we do want to upload our logo here. So, let's click on upload. And I'll go ahead and upload my logo here. Snapchat recommends uploading a logo of at least 700x 100 pixels. So, I'll double click on my logo to upload it. And then I'll click on crop image. Now, we'll go ahead and upload here. Now, let's scroll down and take a look at our message design settings. You can use this if your ad is eligible to be sent to users as a chat message. Here you can customize what the chat message will say and also you can choose if you want to give an auto response. For this campaign I'm not going to be doing this so I'm just going to turn it off. Last up here is the delivery settings. I'm going to go ahead and turn the status off for now just like before. So that way the ad won't run until it's approved. The impression trackers and click trackers are more advanced tools that are usually used by bigger brands. So if you're just getting started, don't worry about these. Now let's go to the bottom right here and click on review and publish. Okay, so before we actually publish our campaign, we're able to review everything one last time to make sure we're happy with everything that we've created. You'll also need to make sure that you fill out your business address here. You'll also have to scroll down to the bottom here and fill out your payment information. And once everything is done, go to the bottom right here and click on publish campaign. And just like that, your ads are now publishing. It was successful and our ads are now under review. To manage the campaign further, click on manage campaign here. And now we're brought back to the manage ads page. Here I can see the current amount spent, my paid impressions, clicks, and click rate. And if I scroll down, I can get a look at all of the campaigns, ad sets, and ads that I've created so far. Now, once you've created your first few campaigns, the next step is going to the top left and then checking out the analyze tab. Here you can get a better look at your audience insights, reports, and most importantly, the campaign lab. Let's go ahead and click on campaign lab here. And this is where we can run split tests. You'll be able to quickly figure out what's working, and you can start improving and scaling up your best campaigns. So, you published your first campaign, but what do you do next? I mentioned this earlier on in the video, but make sure you let the campaign run for at least 4 days before judging the results. This will give Snapchat time to go through its learning phase and figure out the best audience for your ad. The more data it collects, the better your future campaigns will perform. Then, once you found your winning adsets, you should start scaling them. Gradually start increasing the budget on your winning adsets. A good rule of thumb is to bump the budget by 20 to 30% every 48 hours. With that said, thank you for watching this video and make sure you don't forget to use the link in this video's description to claim your $375 ad credit. redeem that special offer today to instantly double your campaign budget.