Your next customer is in Chat

TOGETHER WITH

Rethink your ad spend. See how Snapchat helps brands find net-new customers by turning private connection into measurable performance. Learn more.

You’ve heard the advice before: Test more creatives, lean on the platforms that worked last year, defend the budget with blended metrics on return or costs. For a long time, this was the plan, and it was safe. But as attention and influence have moved elsewhere, this plan no longer works. In fact, it’s paying a quiet tax: spending to reach the same people, the same way, while your next customer may be elsewhere.

Today, consumers are retreating to their inner circles, trading public broadcasting for more private chats with friends and family. Per eMarketer, the majority of US Gen Zers now say they primarily use social media for direct messaging rather than public posting, and it isn’t only Gen Z. Chat and messaging apps are now the most-used platform type even among people 45 to 64.

This also changes where purchase decisions are made. Increasingly, people are deciding to buy via DM, a group chat, or a friend’s recommendation before they ever see an ad for it.

The clearest example I know is from my own home. For my son’s birthday a year ago, my daughter appointed herself chief gift decider. As my son is obsessed with Hot Wheels, she watched videos from her favorite creators, compared options, checked out different marketplaces, asked me to ask her favorite AI chatbot, and saved one toy set to a cart. Then she waited, watching for the price to drop (a dad win!) and hit buy the moment a discount showed up. Notice how much of that happened in conversations with friends, family, and even a chatbot.

That’s the path customers take now, and it isn’t a straight line. On average, consumers interact with over 130 mobile touchpoints a day. So why are we still treating media plans like a funnel?

Today’s media landscape is more crowded than ever, especially with AI-generated content. Posts are abundant but rarely differentiated. Ads that don’t feel relevant get tuned out. This means that brands should expand to new channels where consumers are paying attention, rather than optimizing for a shrinking slice of influence.

Your next customer is on Snapchat

I’ve seen this consumer shift firsthand on Snapchat. Because our platform was designed for connection, Snapchatters keep coming back. It’s why Snapchatters in the US open the app more than 30 times a day¹, and nearly a billion people globally log in every month to talk to their friends and family.²

More importantly, so many Snapchatters aren’t on other platforms. Almost 80% of US Snapchatters aren’t on Pinterest daily, 40% aren’t on TikTok, and 31% aren’t on Instagram³. For a marketer whose real goal is the next customer, that’s net-new reach, not duplicate impressions. But understanding where your audiences are is only one part of the equation. Knowing how to spend smarter is the other.

Get out of last-click jail

As marketers head toward the holiday sales period, there’s one thing that will quietly cost you the most. Last-click models overestimate lower-funnel ad impact by up to 61%.⁴ So when costs spike in Q4, last-click pushes you to pour your most expensive dollars into claiming conversions that were going to happen anyway, while underfunding the channels that actually created the demand. You end up paying peak prices to re-buy customers you already had. That’s the quiet tax. And it’s highest exactly when every dollar matters most.

In reality, last-click tells you who was standing at the finish line when the consumer crossed. It doesn’t tell you what got them there: the Snap they saw three hours earlier, the Story that put a product on their radar, the friend who sent it in Chat. It’s like judging a movie by its final scene: You know how it ended, but you missed the entire plot.

But when you actually look at the full picture on Snapchat, the results speak for themselves. TransUnion found that Snapchat delivered the highest indexed ROAS of all 12 media channels in commerce.⁵ And last Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Northbeam clients cut the cost of winning a new customer by 20% on Snapchat, while every other major platform got more expensive.

Apparel brand Comfrt put it to the test. Working with incrementality platform WorkMagic, it ran a lift test and found 3x incremental ROAS, a 32% lift in revenue—and that 79% of the customers it drove were brand-new. That’s the whole point: not claiming credit for a sale that was coming anyway, but finding customers you didn’t have.

Spend smarter this holiday season

At Snapchat, we don’t stop there. We continue evolving our product suite so advertisers can find even more value. That’s why this month, we launched the Commerce Power Pack, a set of new performance updates designed to help advertisers prepare for the upcoming shopping season and spend smarter on Snapchat.

The Commerce Power Pack focuses on two key areas. First, we’re helping advertisers more effectively turn product discovery into action by bringing DPA to Sponsored Snaps. This brings catalog product ads directly into Chat, our most-used surface with 85% of Snapchatters using it regularly.⁵ Second, we’re helping advertisers optimize toward the outcomes that matter most to them. New products like Value Optimization let advertisers optimize for return on ad spend, and Third-Party Web Optimization optimizes toward the third-party purchase outcomes you already use.

With the Commerce Power Pack, you can stop playing it safe and turn holiday shopping moments into real business results.

Learn more about how Snapchat can help you find your next customer here.

^{1. Snap Inc. Internal Data 2025}

^{2. Snap Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings}

^{3. GWI Q3 & Q4 2025. Sample Size: 8,322 Snapchatters aged 16–64 who use the platform daily.}

^{4.Upper Funnel Versus Lower Funnel Marketing, Measured}

^{5. 2024 Alter Agents Study ‘How We Snap’ Commissioned by Snap Global Snapchatters (n=12000). Data is consumer stated from survey and not based on observed platform behavior.}