Snapchat Ads for Business: Ads Manager Setup Steps and Common Mistakes

To run Snapchat ads for your business you first need three things in Snapchat Ads Manager: a business account, a Public Profile for your company, and an ad account with the right currency and time zone. The campaign is then built in three layers: the campaign, where you choose the objective; the ad set, where you set targeting, budget and placements; and the ad itself, with its creative and link. Before launch you install the Snap Pixel on your website, so you know what the ads actually achieved and not only how many people saw them.

This guide walks you through the steps as Snap’s official help pages document them as of November 2026, followed by common mistakes and how to read the results. If your question comes earlier, whether Snapchat is the right platform for your budget at all, start with our article on where to spend your ad budget in Saudi Arabia.

Before the campaign: the account, the Public Profile and the ad account

Snap states that before launching any ad you need a Snapchat account, a business account and a Public Profile (Set Up Your Snapchat and Business Account). In brief:

1. Create the business account at ads.snapchat.com with the company name and a work email, then enter the business details: the ad account country, currency, phone number and website. Choose the username carefully, because Snap notes it cannot be changed later.
2. Create the company’s Public Profile. A Public Profile is required to advertise and is free, and it becomes visible and searchable as soon as it is created, so prepare the name and picture before you click Create Profile. The profile picture must be at least 320×320 pixels and no larger than 2 MB (How to Set up a Public Profile for Your Business).
3. Create the ad account from the Ad Accounts menu, then New Ad Account. You will be asked whether you are an agency buying ads for a client, whether you will advertise housing, employment or credit, and whether the ads are political. You then enter the account name, billing type, currency, time zone and Public Profile (How to Create an Ad Account).
4. Add a payment method before launching your first ad.

Note: according to Snap’s own page, the currency, time zone and billing type cannot be changed after the ad account is created. If you choose the wrong currency, the fix is a new account. So choose from the start the currency your company accounts in and the time zone of your city, so reports match your working days and Google Analytics.

Who owns what: roles and permissions

The most important administrative decision here is that the account stays owned by the company, and that an agency or employee receives only as much permission as they need. Snap distinguishes organisation roles from ad account roles (Organization Roles and Permissions and Ad Account Roles and Permissions):

Step 1: choose the campaign objective

From the menu choose Create Ads, and the campaign tree appears at the side: campaign, then ad sets, then ads (Campaign Creation Guide). In 2024 Snap reduced the objectives from 12 options to five (Snapchat for Business), and the objective determines which ad formats are available to you (Available Ad Types by Objective):

At campaign level you write its name and status (active or paused), and you can set a start and end date, a daily spend cap and a total spend cap, or create a comparison test (Split Test) (Build Your Campaign). The rule: choose the objective that matches what you want the person to do. Someone who wants quotation requests should not choose Awareness because impressions are cheaper there.

Step 2: build the ad set

The ad set is where the budget is actually spent. Snap used to call it an Ad Squad, and the current help pages call it an Ad Set. The core fields according to Build Your Ad Sets:

• Performance goal: chosen from a list that changes with the campaign objective, such as landing page views or form submissions.
• Bidding strategy: three options (Bidding Strategies): Auto-Bid lets the system get the most results within your budget, Max Bid lets you set the highest bid, and Target Cost tries to keep the average cost per result at or below the figure you set.
• Budget: daily or lifetime. A daily budget runs on calendar days, not 24-hour periods, and scheduling by hours (Dayparting) requires a lifetime budget (Set an Ad Set Budget). In the Snap pages we reviewed we found no published minimum in riyals, so check the minimum shown in your account.
• Locations: places to include and others to exclude, at country level or regions within it. Focus on the area your company actually serves.
• Demographics: age, gender and language. If your product requires an age restriction, enable the Regulated Content option.
• Audiences: ready-made audiences from Snap, or custom audiences from your customer lists or from website visitors via the pixel, and Lookalike audiences built from them.
• Tracking: enable the Snap Pixel and select its ID, so conversions are counted and audiences can be built.
• Frequency cap: sets how many times a person sees the ad in a given period.

Ads Manager shows an estimate of audience and results at the top of the screen. Snap states that an ad set must reach at least 1,000 people, so very narrow targeting will not work.

Placements: where your ad will appear

Snap recommends Smart Placement for the widest reach, which includes Stories, Spotlight, premium content and others. Through Edit Placement you can limit delivery to friends’ Stories, publisher and creator Stories, Spotlight, or curated content (Placement Options). There is also the Chat Feed placement, where ads appear as Sponsored Snaps inside the chat tab and which requires a Public Profile with a picture (Sponsored Snaps). Our advice is to start with automatic placements, then review the placement report once enough data has accumulated.

Step 3: design the ad itself

The most used format is the full-screen single image or video. The basic specifications as of November 2026, according to Single Image or Video Specifications:

Among Snap’s creative guidelines: leave the top 150 pixels and bottom 330 pixels free of text and logo, and ads between 3 and 5 seconds often drive action (Creative Best Practices). In practice: write the on-screen text in Arabic, show the offer in the first two seconds, and make the call-to-action button match what happens after the tap. “Request a quote” should open a form, not the home page.

If you choose the Leads objective you can attach a lead form inside Snapchat, where you choose the fields and add questions specific to your business, a disclaimer or marketing consent, and an end page (Lead Form Attachment). It can be connected to tools such as HubSpot, Zapier and Google Sheets (CRM Integrations for Lead Generation). Snap’s policies require a privacy policy to be available wherever you collect personal data. Since you are collecting data on people in the Kingdom, also review what the Personal Data Protection Law requires for direct marketing.

Step 4: review and publish

Review the schedule, budget and audience, preview the ad, then publish. Every ad is reviewed by Snap against its advertising policies, community guidelines and terms of service, and “most ads are reviewed within 8 hours” though it can take longer, and editing an approved ad or ad set may send it back to review (What is Ad Review?). So upload ads well before the campaign date.

Snap’s advertising policies contain restrictions that name Saudi Arabia: ads for alcohol, dating apps and hormonal contraceptives may not target the Kingdom, and ads for prescription drugs require prior approval from Snap. Health product ads may promote only what local regulators have approved, and financial services must clearly disclose their material terms. Snap also rejects weak landing pages, including pages not optimised for mobile.

Snap Pixel and Conversions API: the basics

Without tracking you will know how many people saw the ad, but not how many of them submitted a form, called or bought. The steps for installing the pixel directly on the website, according to Directly Implement the Pixel:

1. From the menu choose Pixels, then Create Pixel, name it and select the ad accounts that will use it.
2. From Set up Pixel copy the Pixel Code and paste it into the header of the website template.
3. Add Standard Events such as PAGE_VIEW, SIGN_UP and PURCHASE. Snap states that sending at least one standard event is a condition for conversion attribution.

Conversions API is a way of sending the same events from the server, and Snap recommends sending the same events that are sent through the pixel to reduce signal loss (Conversions API FAQs). So that a conversion is not counted twice, the same identifier must be sent on both sides: client_dedup_id in the pixel corresponds to event_id in Conversions API, and the deduplication window is 48 hours (Snap Developers: Deduplication). Snap’s CAPI Gateway option runs alongside the pixel and does not replace it (Introduction to CAPI Gateway). If your store is on the Zid platform, there is a Snapchat Ads app in the Zid app store for connecting the pixel and Conversions API (Snapchat for Business: Zid).

Before installing, define which event represents a “lead” for you (a form, a WhatsApp click or a call), and match it with what you measure in GA4 as we explained in lead tracking in Google Analytics 4.

A Saudi point: content creators and the Mawthooq licence

If your ad will rely on a content creator or celebrity presenting your product, the General Authority for Media Regulation issues the Mawthooq licence to individuals who provide advertising content on social platforms, and one of its obligations is that the ad runs through an account registered with the Authority and linked to the licence (General Authority for Media Regulation). Verify the licence before contracting, and confirm any obligations on your company directly with the Authority.

Common mistakes in Snapchat ads

• Wrong currency or time zone in the ad account. They cannot be edited later, and the result is reports that do not match working days.
• The account in the agency’s or an employee’s name. Make the Organization Admin someone from the company, and give others Campaign Manager or Data Analyst roles.
• An objective that does not match the desired result. An Awareness campaign followed by the question: why are we not getting enquiries?
• Launching without a pixel, or with the wrong event. Without a standard event conversions will not be attributed, and the system will not learn who submits forms.
• Counting a conversion twice when using both the pixel and Conversions API without a shared deduplication identifier.
• Targeting that is too narrow, or many ad sets with small budgets.
• A horizontal design, or text in the blocked areas at the top and bottom of the screen, or a message that does not appear in the first two seconds.
• A landing page not optimised for mobile, or a redirect that drops UTM parameters.
• Editing ads every day. Some edits send the ad back to review.

How to read Snapchat ad results

Start with three levels of numbers according to the Delivery Metrics Glossary:

• Reach and frequency: Paid Reach is the number of unique people, and Paid Frequency is the average number of times a person saw the ad. High frequency with weak results usually points to creative fatigue.
• Attention: 2-second and 15-second video views.
• Result: conversions and cost per result for the event you chose as the performance goal. These are the numbers on which budget decisions are made.

Remember that since 22 August 2024 Ads Manager shows reports by default by impression time with a 28-1 attribution window, meaning 28 days after a click and one day after a view (Reporting Settings). So Snapchat figures will not match Google Analytics; among the reasons Snap gives is that Ads Manager counts every click while Google Analytics groups interactions into sessions. Snap recommends adding utm_source=snapchat to links, avoiding redirect pages, and matching attribution windows and the time zone between the two tools (Google Analytics for Snapchat Ads FAQs). The rule: do not look for an exact match but for a consistent trend between the two sources, then tie the results to what actually reached the sales team.

Checklist before you press Publish

• The ad account is in the company’s name, with the right currency and time zone, and a payment method added.
• The Public Profile is ready with a clear name and picture.
• The campaign objective and performance goal match the result you want.
• The pixel works, and the standard event representing a lead is firing correctly.
• The design is vertical 9:16, the Arabic text is outside the blocked areas, and the message is clear from the start.
• The link carries UTM parameters and opens a mobile-optimised page, and the privacy policy is visible if you collect data.
• Ads were submitted for review well before the launch date.

If you want campaigns and measurement managed together, see our services for performance marketing and paid ads and analytics, tracking and conversion measurement.