A new way to optimize campaign performance with Twitter Ads

Thursday, 7 August 2014

Since we launched Twitter Ads in 2010, advertisers have used Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts to connect with an engaged audience at precisely the right moment. Over the last four years, we’ve analyzed thousands of Twitter Ads campaigns and identified best practices to help advertisers effectively achieve their marketing goals.

Today, we’re excited to announce objective-based campaigns, reports and pricing. This will make it easier for advertisers to create and optimize successful marketing campaigns — and pay only for the actions that are aligned with their marketing objectives. Objective-based campaigns and pricing are now available in beta to SMBs and API partners globally, and we’ll be rolling this out to managed clients by invitation over the next few months.

Optimize for your objectives

With objective-based campaigns, we’ll provide a custom workflow aligned to your campaign goals. You can select from a range of key objectives, including driving Tweet engagements, website clicks or conversions, app installs or engagements, followers, or leads.

A new way to optimize campaign performance with Twitter Ads

Select the best ad format

For each objective, the campaign setup workflow will recommend the best ad format to use. We’ve also added tools to make it simpler to create your ad, including an image cropper with drag-and-drop capability so you can easily customize your photos.

Let’s say you’re a camera retailer, and you want to drive more visitors to the summer promotion on your website. You can create a website clicks or conversions campaign, and then promote a Tweet with a website link or Website Card, our recommended ad format that is specifically designed to drive website traffic.

A new way to optimize campaign performance with Twitter Ads

Pay for performance

Objective-based campaigns are designed to help you drive the highest possible ROI from your ads. Now, you’ll only pay when a user takes an action aligned with your campaign objective. For example, if your goal is to drive leads on Twitter, you’ll only pay when users submit their information via a Lead Generation Card in your Promoted Tweet. By the same token, an app install or app engagement campaign will be charged on a cost-per-app-click (CPAC) model. Objective-based pricing ensures that you only pay for the results that impact your marketing goals.

Track metrics that matter most

Once you launch an objective-based campaign, it’s easy to optimize performance because your reports will display metrics that are most relevant to your goals. For instance, reports for your website clicks or conversions campaign will show total link clicks and cost-per-link-click. If you have a tracking pixel set up, the reports will also show total conversions and cost per conversion. All campaign data can be easily downloaded into a CSV file.

A new way to optimize campaign performance with Twitter Ads

Over the last several months, we’ve seen positive results from clients who have participated in the objective-based campaigns and pricing alpha:

Twitter’s new reporting and pricing will allow us to more efficiently optimize our campaigns to drive site traffic for Kirin. 

— Teppei OkamuraAccount Executive from Hakuhodo, an agency based in Japan representing Kirin (@Kirin_Company)

The clean, simple, and intuitive new interface of Twitter’s ad platform has made creating campaigns a breeze as an advertiser. The entire process - from targeting, creative creation, to tracking analytics and reporting – is much improved and has helped deliver extremely strong results for our initiatives.

— Pierce MarchantOnline Marketing, Education at Autodesk (@AutodeskEDU)

As Twitter streamlines their ad interface, it makes it easier for us to track conversions, and easily edit our social campaigns to maximize our reach without spending unnecessarily or missing an opportunity to reach our audience.

— Conor McAdamSocial Media Manager at Popcornflix (@PopcornFlixNews)

Stay tuned

Our goal is to make it easier and faster for all businesses to succeed on Twitter Ads. We’ll continue to enhance our campaign creation and reporting capabilities so that you can optimize for your unique marketing objectives — whether you’re a small business setting up your first Twitter Ads campaign or a large ad agency running hundreds of campaigns. To learn more about objective-based campaigns and pricing, visit our help center.