One of the benefits of using social media for paid advertising is that social networks have a tremendous amount of data on what their users like and engage with. Properly leveraged, that data can lead to far more effective and targeted advertising campaigns than were previously possible using traditional methods. Facebook was the first to take this usefulness to the next level by using their advertising data to place ads on sites and apps other than Facebook. Now, Twitter is getting into the mix by expanding its advertising offerings to make them more attractive to marketers.
“Last year, we launched the Twitter Publisher Network to help advertisers connect with audiences beyond Twitter in thousands of mobile apps while using our powerful measurement, targeting, and creative tools,” wrote Eric Farkas on the Twitter Advertising blog. Since then, we’ve continued to test it with customers, listened to their feedback, and gained valuable insights. Now we’re excited to announce significant expansions to the TPN, including a new name to better reflect the evolution of the product: Twitter Audience Platform – a simple and effective way for advertisers to reach over 700 million people on and off of Twitter.”
One major change is that ad options to increase views of videos have been extended to all marketers who use Twitter for advertising. Previously, these off-Twitter options for promoting a video were only available to certain clients. Now marketers can easily extend their Promoted Video and Tweet engagement campaigns to the Twitter Audience Platform with a single click.
It won’t require too many adjustment to make the ad work on the expanded network. Many of the targeting signals used on Twitter, including the most important ones such as interest, username, and keyword, can be applied to campaigns across mobile apps on the Twitter Audience Platform.
Twitter has also added some creative features to make it easier for marketers to turn popular Tweets into ads that can run on the Twitter Audience Platform. There are several options for turning Promoted Tweets into immersive ad formats like videos, native ads, banners, and interstitials.
To illustrate how this would work, advertisers who have Tweet engagement campaigns on Twitter can quickly transform them into interstitial and native ads. Promoted Video campaigns are turned into in-app video ads. App install or re-engagement campaigns become interstitial or banner ads.
Since these improvements have been in the works for months, Twitter has case studies from several early adopters that show how much the Twitter Advertising Platform helped their companies.
According to Twitter, “brand advertisers who ran campaigns across both Twitter and the Twitter Audience Platform can double their reach and lower CPEs by as much as 30 percent. Additionally, a June 2015 study that we commissioned from MediaScience showed that consumers, both on and off Twitter users, spent about 123 percent more time with Twitter Audience Platform ads compared to traditional mobile interstitial ads”.
They even provided a testimonial from Macy’s. Who used the Twitter Audience Platform to improve their reach.
“By extending our ad campaign from Twitter to mobile apps, we were able to drive incremental reach, strong performance, and promotional efficiencies,” stated Serena Potter, the Group Vice-President for Digital Media Strategy at Macy’s. “We achieved an engagement rate of 7.85%, which surpassed industry benchmarks for mobile display campaigns. The Twitter Audience Platform allowed us to easily connect with our audience throughout their day. Expanding the reach of the Promoted Tweet into apps made for a unique ad unit that drove strong engagement with our brand.”
For marketers who already use Twitter for advertising, these new features offer excellent ways for increasing the reach of their most popular content. For more information on using social media for advertising and marketing, read this article on how Facebook has overtaken Google as a source for referral traffic.