With more than 150 million daily users as of July 2016, Snap Inc. is a shaping up to become a formidable competitor for a slice of your ad budget. Snap Ads officially opened their programmatic ads API, announcing features like A/B testing and email matching. Is now the right time to start allocating a portion of your ad spend to Snap?

If you haven't taken a close look at Instagram Ads, you might consider starting there before jumping into Snap Ads. The 2016 trending price for Snap Ads is around $55 CPM , nearly 10x the cost of Instagram's reported $5.68 CPM during the same time period. If your target audience is a Snap user, they're most likely also using Instagram.

The age demographics of Instagram and Snap users widely overlap, given your target market is between 18 and 34. In the United States, 18-24 yr-olds make up 37 percent of Snap users and 23 percent of Instagram users. And young professionals between 25 - 34 years old make up 26 percent of both Snap and Instagram users.

My recommendation, test and optimize campaigns where you can get more reach and data for your spend, then adapt your campaigns for your Snap audience.

Are Snap Ads worth it in the end? Maybe. 150 million daily users are half of Instagram's 300 million, but it's still a massive amount of people.

Will Instagram Stories eat away at Snap's daily views? Is it really worth being on Snap if you're not a huge brand? We'd love to hear your thoughts.