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Introduction

Snapchat Ads is Snap Inc.’s advertising platform, delivering single-image, video, story, collection, and AR-lens ads across the Snapchat app, Discover, and Spotlight surfaces. It is used by performance and brand marketers to reach Snap’s predominantly younger audience with CPM, CPC, and CPV payment models across awareness, consideration, and conversion objectives. As a marketing connector, metrics, breakdowns, and currencies are standardized so widgets can aggregate across sources without additional configuration. To connect this data source, see How to connect Snapchat to Adriel.

Data refresh strategy

Architecture data

Architecture covers ad accounts, campaigns, ad squads (ad sets), ads, and creatives. It refreshes every 4 hours, at minute 0 (UTC). On data source creation, the cache fills with 365 days of historical data for the ad account, campaign, ad set, and ad levels.

Reports data

Reports include daily performance metrics for ad accounts, campaigns, ad squads, and ads. Cache-only. Report data comes from cached daily performance snapshots — dashboard queries always read from the last snapshot, never live from Snapchat. Uniqueness caveat. Metrics based on uniqueness (such as reach) can be overvalued when viewed for a date period longer than one day, because uniqueness is computed per snapshot rather than across the full range. Refresh schedule. Reports refresh on this cadence:
  • 4:00 PM UTC daily — syncs the last 30 days for the six segmentation breakdowns, each per ad account: age, location, gender, device target, country, and DMA region.
  • Every 10 hours, at minute 0 (UTC) — syncs the last 30 days for the campaign, ad set, and ad levels.
Data is reliable within the cache sync period. Data outside this range may be incomplete or inaccurate due to legacy caching behavior.

Architecture levels

Organization → Ad account → Campaign → Ad squad (ad set) → Ad → Creative

Date range limits

The connector enforces these maximum look-back windows to keep query sizes manageable:

Attribution windows

Snapchat conversion metrics are reported against attribution windows configured on the data source. Two windows are available:
  • Swipe-up (click) window1_DAY, 7_DAY, or 28_DAY.
  • View window1_HOUR, 3_HOUR, 6_HOUR, 1_DAY, or 7_DAY.
An action_report_time setting further controls whether conversions are counted at conversion time or impression time. These settings are chosen when the data source is created and apply to all attributed conversion metrics.

Metrics

How to read the columnsData type uses Adriel’s vocabulary — Number, Currency, Percentage, Ratio, Duration, Date, Text, URL, Array, Boolean. API Key in code style like impressions is the literal Snapchat Marketing API field; where the same raw field name is shared across objects (Snapchat returns name for the ad account, ad, ad set, and campaign, and id for several objects), it’s shown qualified as object.field (for example account.name) so each row stays unique; italic marks a value Adriel computes, derives, or parses. Some rows share a raw source field — for example swipes backs several click metrics — so the same key can appear on multiple rows; that’s the shared source field, not a duplicated entry. Snapchat reports spend and budgets in microcurrency (millionths of a unit); Adriel divides by 1,000,000 before display, so dashboards always show standard currency, and when an ad account’s currency differs from the workspace currency, costs are converted using the day’s exchange rate.

Basic

Campaign Attributes

UTM values are parsed by Adriel, not returned by Snapchat. Adriel reads the UTM query parameters from each ad’s landing URL and exposes them for rollup.

Campaign Structure

Computed Metric

These are calculated by Adriel from other metrics; they have no single underlying Snapchat field.

Conversion Performance

Engagement

Impression Click Performance

Snapchat’s primary click action is the swipe-up. swipes backs both Clicks (All) and Link Clicks, and CTR is therefore a swipe-through rate.

Video Performance

Snapchat-specific

These metrics exist only for Snapchat and aren’t part of any cross-connector category. Every group above is a standard category shared with other connectors.
Attachment metrics (the rows keyed attachment_*) measure engagement with the ad’s attachment — for example a swipe-up landing experience — rather than with the top-level ad.
Conversion events come from your ad account. Conversion events tracked on the ad account are imported automatically and appear on the dashboard only when the underlying event is active. For each imported event, Adriel also generates derived KPIs such as ROAS, CPA, and conversion rate.

Breakdowns

Basic

Campaign Structure

Creatives

Adriel post-processes ad creatives to generate these breakdowns.

Date

Snapchat returns daily records; all time-grouping breakdowns are Adriel-side aggregations of the same underlying daily data.

Others

Snapchat-specific

These breakdowns exist only for Snapchat and aren’t part of any cross-connector category. Every group above is a standard category shared with other connectors.
Segmentation breakdowns. Age, Country, Device Target, DMA Region, Gender, and Location are audience segmentation breakdowns: only one can be applied per query, they are available at the ad-account level, and some metrics are unavailable while one is active (see Limitations).

Limitations

  • No ad-account report level — report requests at the ad-account level are served at the campaign level; ad-account rollups aggregate campaign rows.
  • One segmentation breakdown at a time — the Snapchat API accepts a single report_dimension value per query, so age, gender, location, device target, country, and DMA region cannot be combined.
  • Metrics unavailable with segmentation — when a segmentation breakdown is active, 14 metric fields are removed from the request because the API rejects them in that combination, including average and total view-time metrics, video_views_15s, earned_impressions, earned_reach, total_reach, play_time_millis, profile_clicks, native_leads, and conversion_subscribe / its value.
  • Uniqueness over long ranges — reach and other uniqueness-based metrics can be overvalued for date ranges longer than one day, because uniqueness is computed per snapshot.
  • Cache-only reporting — dashboards read from cached snapshots, not live Snapchat data; values are most reliable within the actively synced 30-day window.
  • No deleted-data exclusion — data for elements deleted on the platform is not available after deletion.

API references

See also