Background
As performance advertising on Snapchat scales rapidly, advertisers increasingly invest in creative designed to drive immediate actions: swipes, clicks, and conversions. While optimization settings and audience targeting are well understood, the question remained:
How much does creative itself influence performance and what creative choices matter most?
To answer this, Snapchat partnered with Adverteyes in early 2025 to quantify the impact of creative quality and provide predictive, practical guidance advertisers can use before campaigns launch.
Executive Summary
- 12,600 performance video ads were analyzed, making this one of the largest creative effectiveness studies to date.
- Creative quality accounts for 45% of the controllable variation in CTR within performance campaigns.
- Creative quality amplifies platform optimization; it doesn’t replace it.
- Attention and Happiness (measured by genuine smiles) were the strongest predictors of higher CTR.
- Other key contributors included visual pacing, tone and mood, and narrative structure.
- Top-tier creative based on the Snap Impact Score delivered 87% higher CTR than lower scoring creative.
The Challenge
Advertisers on Snapchat often don’t know whether creative assets will perform until campaigns are live after media dollars are spent. Snapchat wanted to understand how much creative quality itself drives performance outcomes, and which creative elements matter most for CTR.
Snapchat wanted to understand how much creative quality itself drives performance outcomes
The Solution
Adverteyes evaluated each of the 12,600 Snapchat video ads across:Â
- Attention
- Emotional Reactions
- Content Features (pacing, branding, narrative etc.)
These signals were then modeled against real-world click-through rate (CTR) to reveal which creative factors truly predict performance.
This analysis led to the development of the Snap Impact Score, a predictive metric combining attention, emotion, and creative content data — enabling advertisers to assess and optimize creative before launch.
Attention and Happiness (smiles) were the strongest determinants of high performance
Results
- Creative quality drives 45% of controllable CTR variation, making it a meaningful and actionable performance lever.
- Attention and Happiness are far stronger performance predictors than many traditional executional features.
- Top-scoring creative achieves 87% higher CTR, validating the power of predictive creative metrics.
- Snap Impact Scores can be generated instantly and at scale, empowering advertisers to rapidly evaluate hundreds of variants pre-launch.
Source: 2025 Adverteyes analysis of 12.6k Snachat Ads
The Snap Impact Score synthesizes these signals. Top scoring ads drove 87% higher CTR.
Creative quality accounts for 45% of the controllable variation in CTR within performance campaigns.​
Attention and Happiness (measured by genuine smiles) were the strongest predictors of higher CTR.
Outlook
What This Means for Advertisers
- Creative quality is now a measurable, predictable, and improvable performance driver.
- Attention and emotional resonance should be central to creative strategy, not afterthoughts.
- Predictive scoring tools like the Snap Impact Score shift decision-making from post-launch hindsight to pre-launch confidence.
A first-of-its-kind system that provides unprecedented creative intelligence for advertisers on Snapchat
Methodology
- Scope: 12,600 Snapchat performance video ads
- Modeling: Logit-based performance modeling with cross-validation
- Outcome Metric: Swipe-up / click-through rate (CTR)