It’s not normal for a social media app to ask you what kinds of ads you want to see. Most just follow you around on the internet, keep a long, detailed record of everything you do, and wing it from there. Snapchat however does let you tweak ad preferences. To be clear, it does have a vague idea as to what ads to show you. This is likely based on who you follow, and perhaps on what you snap. Regardless, you can tweak ad preferences in Snapchat. Here’s how.
These ad settings were rolled out to users worldwide just last week so update the app before you tweak ad preferences in Snapchat.
Open Snapchat and tap the thumbnail at the top left next to search. This will take you to your Profile screen. Here, tap the cog wheel button at the top right.
Scroll down and tap ‘Manage’. On the Manage screen, there are two options you need to visit; Ad Preferences, and Lifestyle Categories.
Ad preferences let you choose what the ads you see are based on i.e. your audience or your activity. You can enable or disable either one, or both.
The Lifestyle Categories don’t deal with ads. They’re more to do with suggested content which is slightly different from an ad. You will find that at least one category is already enabled here. You can turn it off, or you can enable more categories that match your interests.
There’s no option that will let you disable ads in Snapchat but if you’re concerned about privacy after the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica debacle, you might want to stop the targeted ads at the very least.
There’s no way to block a certain ad on Snapchat which is kind of odd. Both Facebook and Twitter let you hide an ad and ask why you’r hiding it with reasons that include the ad showing up too often, or the ad not being relevant or of interest to you. Snapchat doesn’t do any of that but it seems it doesn’t try to guess what you like or dislike.
The lifestyle categories are pretty much at your disposal to enable and disable however you want. Snapchat is letting you choose which types of ads and what kind of suggested content you see so there’s probably less of a chance that you’ll see anything irrelevant. That said, they don’t exactly vet their ads very well so it is possible that an ad claiming to be about something you’re interested in is about something completely different.
