Recently, Twitter announced its new Tailored Audiences tool, which allows marketers to target ads directly to people who fit a relevant audience category through their web browsing activity. This tool includes retargeting to a brand’s website visitors as well as using specific audiences from third party data. The availability of Tailored Audiences to all marketers revolutionizes the potential of Twitter advertising to be able to zero in on the people your brand wants to reach.
While managing PPC campaigns across a variety of platforms covering search, display and social media, I’ve frankly experienced minimal success when advertising via Twitter. While decent for pure awareness boosting, the opportunity for ROI-focused campaigns has been minimal. However, the availability of more customized targeting allows for much better focus on reaching audiences ready to purchase.
Social is not search
When placing ads on Twitter, remember that you’re reaching people in the context of social media, where people expect much different behavior than in search. When running ads in Google AdWords to show up in search results, you’re targeting people who are showing direct intent to find your product or service and expect to see immediate offers. However, social media involves relationships and conversations, where throwing offers in people’s faces often serves only to annoy.
For example, say you’re promoting a store that sells outdoor winter gear. If someone’s searching for “buy snowshoes on sale,” you want to have an ad that promotes a specific offer on snowshoes, say, “Buy Snowshoes 50% off for a Limited Time,” showing up for that query. However, that same message could be jarring when blasted out on Twitter to anyone that vaguely fits a “winter sports” interest category, and may turn off people who aren’t necessarily looking to buy snowshoes right away.
Reach the right audience at the right time
The new Tailored Audience tool changes the game quite a bit. The same store could limit ads to only show to people who had looked at snowshoes on their website in the last 30 days and had not purchased. That way, they could avoid annoying people that weren’t considering a purchase, and directly reach those who may have been wavering about a possible purchase, but would jump for the opportunity with a better offer.
The opportunities for customizing audiences to reach via Twitter are endless. Brands can segment buckets of visitors based on website pages viewed, as well as tie in third-party data to reach people based on income levels, propensity to purchase and relevant interests. However, the value of any online campaign is only as effective as the ability to measure its success.
Measure results
As with any online or offline marketing campaign, money spent on advertising is a waste unless the proper tracking is set up. Marketers can track success of Twitter advertising using several methods and should have a clear plan for setting this up before starting. Make sure you look beyond surface metrics like clicks and impressions to measure the actual return seen from these ads.
First, use Twitter Ads’ own backend to view statistics on how people have interacted with your ads. You can see how ads with various messaging perform against each other in areas such as click-through rate (the percentage of people that click out of those who see an ad) and use that data to refine your campaigns.
Second, ensure you are properly tracking visits to your website from these ads. Direct people to a landing page with a clear goal, often a product purchase or a lead submission, and use an analytics tool like Google Analytics to measure the success of this goal. Google’s URL Builder provides an easy way to tag your URLs so you know which visits came from ads.
Twitter’s introduction of Tailored Audiences brings marketers a new channel to directly reach potential customers. Take some time to review the opportunities available and consider using a small spend to test Twitter Ads out for your business.