Since Meta is used by the majority of Smartly customers, many have become accustomed to editing published ads rather than having them archived and recreated. This is possible due to Meta’s APIs allowing third-party partners, such as Smartly, to modify live ads. As a result, Smartly’s product standard has been to support edits to published ads whenever the channel’s APIs permit it.
For Snapchat, Smartly has aimed to align with this standard, but with varying outcomes over time. Initially, any changes to published Snapchat ads triggered an archive-and-recreate process. In 2025, in response to customer expectations, Smartly updated this behavior to allow edits to published ads.
In 2026, it became clear that the Snapchat API doesn’t support edits to all fields of the creative. To ensure successful creative publishing on the Smartly side, we decided that if ad-level Media, Story, or Dynamic Options cards are changed, we always create a new creative, which in turn requires the ad to be archived and recreated.
Additionally, Snapchat is currently developing a solution to make archived ads and their analytics visible in the user interface. This update is scheduled for release in Q1 2026.