My boss at LHV once told me something I still think about every week: if onboarding is broken, marketing only helps you fail faster.
Snap’s Q3 numbers made me think of it again. Because the story isn’t “Snap is slowing down”. The story is that Snap is getting better at one specific thing, and only advertisers who feed it properly get the benefit.
Here’s what happened, and what I’d do with it.
The numbers in one minute
Snap reported on 4 November. Revenue grew 14% to $1.72B. Ad revenue grew only about 4%. Evan Spiegel didn’t sugarcoat it on the call: advertising growth “remains below our ambitions.”
Most of the extra money came from subscriptions, not ads. Snapchat+ and friends now have over 30 million paying users.
Daily users reached 495 million. North America fell to 92 million from 98 million a year ago, so all the user growth is happening outside the US. And from Q1 2027, Snap stops reporting users by region. Make of that what you will.
Where the slowdown came from
Snap’s letter says it plainly: upper-funnel brand advertising declined year over year.
Performance went the other way:
- New AI models in dynamic product ads lifted pixel purchase conversions by over 2.5%.
- For campaigns optimised for app purchases, purchase volume more than doubled and cost per purchase fell about 24%.
So the big brand budgets are cooling. The machine that optimises for conversions is heating up. If you’re a media buyer, that’s the half you care about.
What I’d do with this
1. Fix your signal before you touch your budget. Snap is putting its AI work into conversion optimisation. That only works if your pixel or Conversions API sends Purchase events, with a value, every time. No signal, no benefit. You’re just buying the same impressions as last year.
2. If you run apps, test app purchase optimisation. A 24% lower cost per purchase is Snap’s average across everyone, not your result. Still, it’s a big enough number to deserve a proper test budget this month.
3. Look beyond the US. Snap’s users are growing outside North America. If you only run US traffic, pick one more geo and test it with the creatives that already work for you.
4. Watch your CPMs. My read: when big brand budgets pull back, there’s less competition for the same users. That should show up as softer CPMs in some placements. Track yours weekly for the next month so you notice when it happens.
The ten-minute task for this week
Open Events Manager in Snap Ads Manager. Check that Purchase fires, that it carries a value and a currency, and that the numbers roughly match your backend for the last 7 days.
If they don’t match, that’s your project for the week. It’s boring. It’s also probably the best ROI you’ll find on Snap right now.
Volume still decides who wins
Better optimisation helps, but it doesn’t change the basic math of Snapchat. Most ads still don’t make it through review (we tracked 58,000 of them), and the winners come from teams that test a lot of creatives and kill the losers fast. There’s more on that in why volume wins.
That’s the part we built Adkorly for: Snapchat ad accounts set up for you, one euro wallet to fund them, and your videos pushed in bulk with review status for every ad.
What are you seeing on Snap right now? CPMs up, down, flat? Tell me.
This post is also this week’s issue of CPM & Coffee, my Monday newsletter on LinkedIn.
Sources
- FourWeekMBA, 4 Nov 2026: Ads made about a quarter of Snap’s $216M revenue gain in Q3
- 24/7 Wall St, 4 Nov 2026: Snap’s CEO admits ad growth is below ambitions
