Compose

Compose launches ads. For now it launches on Snapchat; Meta comes later.

A launch, in three steps

1. Campaign. The campaign type (Awareness, Traffic, Leads or Sales), where people convert (your website or a Snapchat lead form), and the ad sets: name, countries, ages, gender and daily budget. Snapchat puts budgets on ad sets, never on the campaign, and its smallest daily budget is 5.00 in any currency. An ad set in several countries also has a language: Snapchat asks for one, and only people using it are reached.
2. Ads. Your videos and pictures (upload them, or tick the finished videos you made in Studio; "All sources" shows both), your headlines (Snapchat shows one headline per ad, at most 34 characters), the brand name (at most 32), the call to action, and the website address with its parameters. "One ad per combination" makes an ad for every video with every headline; "One ad per video or image" uses the first headline only.
3. Accounts. Tick the Snapchat ad accounts to launch in. Each needs a public profile (the name and picture your ads show as), a pixel when the campaign type counts conversions on your website, and a lead form for lead form launches. + New form in the Lead form column makes a Snapchat lead form without leaving the launch: tick the ad accounts it goes on (each gets its own copy) and choose the lead flow its leads go to. Double-click a budget to change it for one account; an account in another currency needs its own amounts.

The launch saves itself as you work. If you open it in two tabs, the second save is refused so you never lose work: reload and carry on.

Publish saves what is on your screen first. If that save fails, nothing is published and the page says so: fix the cause and press Publish again.

Publishing

Publish makes everything in each ad account paused: the campaign, the ad sets and the ads. Nothing spends until you switch it on in Snapchat.

A problem in one ad account holds back only that account, and the launch page lists it under Held back with the reason. If Snapchat refuses something, the launch says "Needs a fix" with Snapchat's reason, and what depends on it is not sent. Fix the cause and press Send again. If the cause is a setting in the launch, Send again repeats it: press Copy to a new draft, change the setting and publish that. The draft has the ad accounts that failed or were held back. What was already made stays in Snapchat, paused unless you switched it on. Stop halts what has not been sent yet; what is made stays.

If ScalingDeck restarts during a launch, the launch can sit on Publishing for a few minutes, then carries on by itself without making anything twice.

Snapchat's review

Snapchat reviews every ad before it can run. The launch page shows each ad as In Snapchat review, Approved by Snapchat or Rejected by Snapchat, with Snapchat's reason. Compose asks Snapchat every few minutes; Refresh review asks now.

If Snapchat keeps failing for a day, its login stops working, or it still has not decided after 7 days, the ad shows Review not checked. Compose has stopped asking, so Snapchat may have decided already. Reconnect the login if that is the reason, then press Refresh review: it reads the review again and keeps following it.

Tracking

The website address carries Snapchat's own ad IDs ({{campaign.id}}, {{adSet.id}}, {{ad.id}}), filled in by Snapchat at each click, so the tracker credits every conversion to its ad. "Fill from a tracker" adds ScalingDeck's tracker parameters or UTM tags.