Twitter Advertising: Complete Guide to Twitter ADS Advertising

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Advertise with Twitter Ads: if you didn't know the possibility, know that there are already 100,000 companies that have used Twitter Ads to promote their services or products not only online but also offline: according to a statistic of Hubspot,, sponsored tweets are able to drive 29% offline sales.

But how does Twitter Advertising work? We take a look at it in this comprehensive guide, where you'll find out, among other things:

  • The 6 goals of a Twitter Ads campaign
  • How to increase engagement of Ads on Twitter to 313%
  • 5 Twitter advertising strategies for your online business

Let's start with the first point.

The 6 goals of a Twitter Ads campaign

Similar to the home screen of Facebook Advertising, also on Twitter Ads the starting point is the choice of the objective that we want to achieve with our campaign.

Twitter Advertising provides 6 main types of goals, as you can see in the next screenshot. Let's see them together in detail.

twitter advertising goals

Interactions with Tweets

If you want to increase the engagement on your Tweets, this is the goal for you. With this goal you can push the maximum interactions with your Tweets, such as retweets, replies, favorites and so on.

The campaign will be viewed by the users you include in your target audience, who will see the ads in their timelines and search results, and you will receive charges for interactions with the Tweets.

interactions with tweets twitter advertising

Clicks to the website or conversions

With this goal you have the possibility to direct people on Twitter that are part of your target audience to a specific website or a landing page.

In this mode you have the possibility to use website cards, extra content made up of an image, a button and a link. With website cards you can improve the performance of your campaign, because each element of the card leads back to the website, which means more visits to the website:

website cards twitter advertising

Similarly to what happens on Google Ads e Facebook AdvertisingTwitter Ads also gives you the possibility to insert in your site a conversion tracking code, called "Conversion Tracking": this code gives you the possibility to monitor the performance of your ads on Twitter Advertising from different points of view.

App installs and new app interactions

With this goal, users will download or open the app by clicking on the image or button: the campaign will receive charges for clicks aimed at installing or opening your app:

twitter advertising app installations

Video Views

This goal gives you the ability to promote videos in users' history or search results: the video preview is expanded in the user's history and played with one click. Don't underestimate the format video, useful to increase leads, sales AND conversions

 Views Video twitter ads

Follower

As you may have guessed, with this Twitter Advertising feature you have the ability to increase the number of followers of your account.

Similar to Facebook Advertising's "promote your page" feature, you can grow your community with this goal.

increase twitter followers advertising

Twitter leads

This goal is also found in other online advertising tools such as Facebook Advertising, with the Lead ADS e LinkedIn Ads, the advertising program of LinkedIn., which in turn has a promotional objective dedicated to lead acquisition, called Lead Generation (Lead Generation).

With the "Lead on Twitter" objective, you can capture a user's contact directly on social media: users see the ad and with one click can send their email.

leads on twitter advertising

How to do Lead Generation on Twitter

Here then you have 2 options Lead Generation on Twitter:

  • if you want to collect the contacts of your potential customers on a landing page external, you can use the "clicks to website or conversions" goal seen above;
  • if instead you want to collect contacts of your potential customers on Twitterthis target is for you.

What's the difference?

In the first case you have the possibility to synchronize your contact form in your landing page with a ESP as Mail Chimp o SendInBlueallowing you to automate the process of sending newsletters to your leads thanks to a workflow of email marketing automation;

In the second case make the user take one less step by collecting your leads directly on Twitter. How? With a Lead Generation Card: let's see together what it is.

The Twitter lead generation card

What are Lead Generation Cards? Lead Generation Cards are attached to your Tweets and allow you to collect contact details from users, directly from Twitter.

They consist of an image and a call to action of your choice. Once a person leaves their contact, you have the option to download your leads from the "creative card manager," a section you'll find within your advertising account. The leads are compiled into the card and are available in CSV format.

Lead Generation Cards create interest in your business from users who decide to share their information with you within a Tweet. Lead Generation Cards automatically capture the user's name, username and email address, and all you have to do is click to send them to you.

Once you have acquired this information, you will be able to use it for your own initiatives to lead nurturingYou can learn more about these issues in the following articles:

Once you've set your goal, you have 4 steps to complete:

  • Set up your campaign: In this section, in addition to naming your Twitter ads campaign, you will decide when you want to publish this campaign, i.e. whether to start immediately or set start and end dates;
  • Select your audience: this is a key section. Here you will choose the target audience for your ad, choosing from numerous options such as location, gender, languages, devices and additional features. As with Facebook Advertising, there is the option to create "Custom Audiences", which in this case can be made up of your email list, Twitter IDs, mobile ad IDs or simply website visitors, i.e. remarketing.
  • Set your budget: in this section you will have to set the maximum daily amount you want to spend and the total budget, as well as between 3 bidding modes: automatic, target or maximum;
  • the final section, "choose creative" allows you to write your ad, obviously composed of a tweet of maximum 140 characters, an image and additional components, such as the already mentioned website card and lead generation card.

Let's go over these 4 sections in detail, starting with the second step, audience selection.

How to select the Audience in Twitter Advertising

Audience selection in Twitter Ads also closely follows the similar section in Facebook Advertising:

public selection advertising on twitter

You have the ability to target your ads:

  • by country, state, region, metropolitan area or zip code, even importing more than one area at the same time;
  • by gender, inferred from information shared while using Twitter, including profile names and follow charts;
  • by languages, to reach only users who speak the selected languages;
  • by devices and platforms, to reach users based on any combination of devices or connection type, such as: IOS devices, Android, Blackberry, or other mobile phones or desktop and laptop computers;
  • for used mobile phone operator: you can d

Similar to Facebook ADS, as we go about defining the Audience, Twitter Ads informs us of the estimated size of the Audience based on the options chosen.

While these options follow the traditional Public features, the additional features for Public offer some interesting insights, let's see them together in detail.

Additional Features for the Public

This section allows us to specify the target audience to whom we want to show our Twitter advertisements.

Add Keywords

add keywords twitter ads

If you set "Tweet interactions" as your goal, you have the option to target by keywords.

Keywords? But wait...keyword targeting wasn't the exclusive preserve of Google Ads? Well no: thanks to this feature Twitter Ads lets you include keywords.

Keyword Targeting allows you to reach Twitter users who use certain keywords in their searches, recent tweets, and tweets they've interacted with.

But the amazing thing is that even on Twitter Ads you have the option to choose the matching option for each keyword. Let's see them together.

Matching options in Twitter Ads

  • Extended correspondence: includes the word in any order, plus related terms, variations, synonyms, mispellings, and slang;
  • Sentence correspondence: includes the word in the exact order;
  • Negative (generic) match: excludes the keyword in any order it is placed;
  • Negative sentence match: excludes the keyword in the exact order in which it is placed;

Add follower

Targeting by @username allows you to show your Twitter ad to users with similar interests to the followers of the account you place. An additional option allows you to include followers similar to those you've selected, similar to the Facebook Ads Similar Audience:

add followers advertising on twitter

For example, if you enter @TwitterAds if you want to target users who are most likely to be interested in advertising on Twitter.

Thanks to the Advanced Twitter Search you can search for the most appropriate followers by searching for words, people, places, dates, or anything else:

Twitter Advanced Search

Add interest

Targeting by interest categories allows you to target users with certain interests, which you can add directly into the search box or select from those provided by Twitter.

Add behaviors

It's a feature intended for the UK and US market only for now, and allows you to select your target audience based on actual online and offline characteristics and behaviours. Users will be eligible for targeting if they exhibit one of your chosen behaviours.

As with interests, you can enter behaviors in the box provided or select them from those provided by Twitter Ads.

Event Targeting

Another feature of Twitter ads allows you to reach a target audience interested in particular events, such as sports, movies...

For example, if you are interested in showing your ad to people who are interested in the Star Wars premiere, you can choose the option in the list of events.

Twitter Ads tailor audiences

Remember Facebook Advertising's Custom Audiences? Even on Twitter you can create a kind of Custom Audience, thanks to the Tailored Audiences: with the Tailored Audiences, you can set as target the most important people for your campaign using your data.

In the tailor audiences you can choose to create an Audience from:

  • a list of contacts, such as email addresses, mobile phone numbers, Twitter user names, Twitter user IDs, mobile advertising IDs;
  • visits to your site or landing page, with which you can do remarketing or retargeting on Twitter.

In this feature you need to install a tag, which is a snippet of code embedded in the site that is triggered when a user takes an action on your site after viewing promoted content or interacting with it on Twitter.

This tag is analogous to Google Ads' conversion tracking tool or Facebook Ads' tracking pixel.

Users of your mobile app

this way you can target app installs, user signups, and other operations performed by users in your mobile app.

Tailored audiences consisting of those who have completed these actions will be automatically created.

You can also use these tailored audiences for remarketing campaigns. Once these data are uploaded, they are provided by Twitter Ads in the Audience Manager: We will go into some strategies to advertise on Twitter with tailor audiences in the second part of this guide, meanwhile we continue with the last 2 sections of your campaign, budget selection and ad writing.

Set the budget for advertising on Twitter

The third and penultimate section of creating a campaign to advertise on Twitter is setting the budget. First, I can set: a maximum daily budget; a maximum spendable amount for the entire campaign;

I can then choose which bidding mode to do from 3 options: automatic bidding, target bidding and maximum bidding.

Automatic bidding

In this case Twitter Advertising will optimize the offer will be optimized to get the best results at the lowest price.

Target offer

Let's assume we're running a Twitter ad campaign with the goal of increasing followers. With this bidding mode we will tell Twitter the target cost per follower and the system will optimize bids to reach the specified average cost, normally within 20% of your target.

This bidding mode gives you the flexibility to win the most competitive auctions for high value users.

Maximum offer

Let's go back to our goal of increasing followers: with the maximum bid, you enter a bid that reflects what a follower is worth to your company. A higher bid will result in your ad being displayed more often.

Making a Twitter Ad

The last section of Twitter Ads allows you to create the advertisement, which will obviously be composed of the sponsored Tweet and a possible image, as well as some additional sections such as the website card (which you can use only if you choose to target visits to the website) or the lead generation card (which you can use only if you choose to target Lead on Twitter).

Once you have completed this fourth step as well, your Twitter advertisement is ready. But how can you leverage Twitter advertising in your online business? We'll look at that in the second part of this article.

How to increase engagement of Ads on Twitter to 313%

But how can we create a Twitter Ads ad that increases engagement? This is revealed by a research published on the site Eloqua.com, called#TweetSmarter, whose goal is to understand how some elements affect the engagement of a Twitter ads, in particular: the length, the presence of rich media (images ...), the tools used;

Sponsored tweets as less than 100 characters generate 18% more engagement
Tweets sponsored with website cards have higher engagement than 43%

Using website cards versus just tweeting + url generates higher engagement than 43%, perhaps because more content leads to a better experience for your potential customers.

Tweets sponsored with lead generation cards have higher engagement than 42%

Similar to website cards, lead generation cards also lead to higher engagement: by allowing you to include an image and a call to action, they allow you to overcome user barriers.

 Images in sponsored tweets increase engagement by 313% and retweets by 52%
 tweets with a Vine video increase engagement by 256%

Inserting a Vine video into the tweet can increase engagement on the Tweet by 256% compared to inserting a single image.

Tweets with an image gallery increase engagement by 173%

Inserting a gallery of images into the tweet can increase engagement on the Tweet by 173% compared to inserting a single image.

 Sponsored tweets from accounts that do @reply at least once a week have +18% of engagement

5 Twitter Advertising Strategies for Online Business

Lead generation with Twitter

As you saw above, you have 2 ways to do lead generation with Twitter Ads:

  • Drive users who click on your ads to a website or landing page so that they leave their contact information;
  • use the twitter lead objective, which allows you to collect contacts from your users already on Twitter.

Remarketing on Twitter

Thanks to Tailor Audiences, you can follow on Twitter those who have visited your site. To implement remarketing or retargeting with Twitter Ads, simply create and insert a conversion tracking code in your site:

tag monitoring conversions twitter ads

Finding contacts on Twitter

Also thanks to tailor audiences, Twitter Ads gives you the opportunity to show your Twitter ad to people whose details you have, such as email address and phone number.

In addition, you can also target your Linkedin contacts on Twitter, in a similar way to what we did with Facebook Ads Custom Audience: just export the emails of your contacts and create a list with them on Twitter Ads.

Increase followers

One of the first goals with Twitter Ads is to increase followers.

In this regard I recommend:

  • clearly state in the ad why they should follow your account;
  • do not use additional images or linksthat might distract from the ultimate goal;

Here's a best practice example in an ad aimed at increasing followers:

increase followers twitter advertising ad

Increase engagement

In addition to followers, on Twitter with advertising you can give more visibility to your tweets allowing you to increase engagement on them. As we have seen above in the statistics, inserting images and keeping the text under 100 characters can help you achieve this goal.

Now it's your turn

How about you? Have you ever advertised with Twitter Ads? What tools have you used? Do you have any Twitter Advertising case histories to share? Let's talk about it in the comments!

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