New ways to create and use tailored audiences

Tuesday, 14 January 2014

In December we announced the global availability of tailored audiences, giving advertisers the ability to reach visitors to their websites directly on Twitter. Today, we’re releasing new ways to create tailored audiences, so that advertisers can define groups of existing and potential customers more flexibly and connect with them on Twitter.

CRM audiences

You can now create tailored audiences from lists of email addresses from your own customer relationship management (CRM) database or you can use your CRM database records that you store with an ads partner. Let’s say a fashion retailer wants to advertise a spring clearance sale on Twitter, and they’d prefer to show their ad to current membership cardholders. To get the special offer to cardholders who are on Twitter, the retailer may create a tailored audience using unreadable scrambles (called hashes) of the email addresses of its card members, through an ads partner. We can then match that information to Twitter accounts in order to show the matched users a Promoted Tweet with the sale information.

New ways to create and use tailored audiences

Twitter ID audiences

You can also create tailored audiences using lists of Twitter IDs - either usernames or user IDs. Suppose the aforementioned retailer wants to build relationships with new prospects on Twitter who are influencers in fashion. The retailer can use public information on Twitter like a user’s bio, follower count, verified status, or past Tweets — from Twitter or by using Twitter’s API or Certified Products — to identify the specific accounts on Twitter which are the most appropriate potential customers. The retailer may then use this list of Twitter ID’s to create a tailored audience through an ads partner, show those fashion influencers a Promoted Account and engage them as followers.

New ways to create and use tailored audiences

Exclusion targeting

We are also introducing the ability for you to exclude selected CRM and Twitter ID audiences from the set of Twitter users reached through our existing targeting options: interests, keywords and TV. For example, the same fashion retailer is also running a new customer acquisition campaign for its membership program, targeting Twitter users interested in style and fashion, and wants to exclude current membership card holders. Their same membership cardholder tailored audience can now be used to remove any user who fits the interest targeting and is also already a cardholder.

The combination of these tools enables a highly relevant and useful message for the user and creates the opportunity for you to reach these known audiences on Twitter with more efficient campaigns. You will continue to receive the same reports that include how many users saw, clicked on or converted from an ad, without identifying specific users.

We’ve made it easy for you to get started with tailored audiences by partnering with leading technology companies that can help you create and transfer audiences to Twitter for targeting. Our ads partners who are helping bring this product to market are: Acxiom, Datalogix, Epsilon, Liveramp, MailchimpMerkle and Salesforce ExactTarget for CRM. We are also introducing the creation of CRM and Twitter ID tailored audiences into our Ads API, now available through Ads API partners that support the capability. Each of these companies has completed all of the required technical integration with us and has the knowledge to guide you through the set-up process.

Users have privacy choices

While we want to make our ads more useful through tailored audiences, we also want to provide simple and meaningful privacy choices to our users. Twitter users can simply uncheck the box in their privacy settings next to “Tailor ads based on information shared by ads partners,” and Twitter will not match their accounts to information from our ads partners for tailored audiences. We also have a minimum audience size for all tailored audiences to avoid overly specific targeting. Our Help Center has more information about users’ privacy settings and our audience size requirements.

Getting started

We are excited about the ways these new tools can be used to help you connect with existing and potential customers on Twitter. If you’re ready to get started, contact your account team for more information, or sign up for an account at ads.twitter.com.