Introducing event targeting

Thursday, 23 July 2015

Millions of people rely on Twitter to discover and engage with a variety of live events. Whether it’s a presidential election, Coachella, Mother’s Day or the Super Bowl, if it’s happening in the world, it’s happening on Twitter. Starting today, advertisers will be able to reach audiences interested in these events with a new feature called event targeting.

With event targeting, you can activate around live moments, quickly and easily. We’ll help you discover and plan for these moments, learn more about the participating audiences through valuable insights, and with one click, create a campaign that delivers the right message to just the right users as the event unfolds.

How it works
Event targeting includes three primary tools: the event calendar, event insights and event activation.

Event calendar
The event calendar surfaces major global events, as well as tentpole events related to sports, holidays, festivals, TV, music and politics in the U.S., UK, France, Brazil and Japan. You can use the calendar to determine what live events make sense for your brand’s marketing strategy and goals. And you can filter by location, date or type of event, and explore all events months in advance.

Introducing event targeting

Event insights
Once you identify which events you’d like to target, you can drill down into each event to learn more about the audience based on the previous year’s data. You can see insights such as a total audience reach, device breakdown and gender. You can also view the highest engaging Tweets from last year to get a sense for how the event conversation played out on Twitter.

Introducing event targeting

Introducing event targeting

Event activation
Once you’ve researched your event audience, you can create a campaign targeting the events of your choice with just one click. Event targeting can be combined with other key targeting types like gender, language and device so you can reach the right segment of an event audience.

Introducing event targeting

Success in beta
Over the last few months, our clients have been telling us how event targeting helped them drive incredible scale and engagement in their campaigns. For example, global agency MEC (@MECideas) used event targeting to help a large brand join the conversation around a week long music festival:

Twitter has transformed consumer visibility into events from superficial to behind-the-scenes, where front seat experiences are not only craved but expected. For agencies tapping into this cultural insight, delivering real-time responses to a ‘lean-forward’ audience positions the brand as a catapult to the VIP section. Through Twitter event targeting, brands can effectively reach these consumers who are not only clicking into content but actively listening. This multi-tiered targeting approach has driven high performance for MEC clients, and helped drive meaningful spikes in awareness among an audience captivated by disruptive advertising. The tool has also been crucial in identifying purposeful investment opportunities through insight into conversation spikes, allowing us to tap into the most strategic moments and prepare conflicting creative for multiple scenarios.

Kaitlyn BigicaSocial Media Manager, MEC Global

SocialCode (@SocialCodeInc), a technology and insights company, leveraged the product when working with a large CPG client around a live event:

Audience insights on an event is a welcome addition for us as it allows us to better understand who we’re targeting against. But we’re most excited for this new tool because of the performance our clients have seen since mid-June: 17.95% engagement rate and a $0.10 cost per engagement. I think there are a lot of opportunities for our clients to continue to leverage this moving forward with other campaigns that have tent pole or live events. Plus, campaign setup is extremely easy and simple.

Avi Ben-ZviPartner Manager, SocialCode

And, Mindshare UK (@mindshare_uk) successfully utilized event targeting to activate against major sporting events for many of the UK’s leading automotive and financial service brands:

Twitter’s new event targeting capability was recently tested on two of our clients amidst their sponsor role of The Championships, Wimbledon 2015 and The Open, St. Andrews 2015. The results could not have been more encouraging, with an average engagement rate improvement ranging from 73% to 110% when compared to our traditional targeting settings.

Sergi Calvo i SolerBiddable Account Director, Mindshare UK

A note on the technology
We use a number of different signals to determine the right audience for an event, including Tweet consumption and engagement data.

Get started
Event targeting is now available to all Twitter advertisers globally. To get started, log in to ads.twitter.com and select “Event calendar” from the Tools menu. To create a Twitter Ads account, visit ads.twitter.com/getstarted today.

Note: We’ve edited one of our screenshots.