Twitter crypto ads are live after the platform unofficially relaxed its ban on advertising crypto products. Perhaps due to the Elon bid there seem to be more ads showing up and less stringent controls on ad quality. This opens up an opportunity for companies in the sector to use the platform for growth. In this article we will look at some of the ads that are running, some tips for targeting and budget control and how to optimize Twitter ad campaigns.
- Crypto Ad Examples
- Setting Budgets, KPIs & Expectations
- Targeting Twitter Ads
- How To Create Effective Twitter Ads
- Optimization Of Ad Campaigns
- Further Opportunities
Crypto Ad Examples
Here are some examples of crypto ads that are currently showing up in the UK and France (sorry if I have outed anyone’s campaign, contact me if you want anything removed).
Setting Budgets, KPIs & Expectations
Lets start by setting up a campaign at https://ads.twitter.com
The first thing we need to do is set a campaign objective:-
I would recommend video, website traffic and followers as the best options.
- Reach will get your ad in front of a lot of unengaged users, it can be used for brand awareness and to get the most impressions per dollar.
- Video works well across all ad platforms and if you have a explainer type video it’s a great choice.
- Pre-roll are the annoying ads that prevent you from watching your content.
- Website traffic is the best choice if you want to actually sell something or get users off Twitter and on to your website. This will also be one of the most expensive options because Twitter likes to keep users in the app.
- Engagements is clicks anywhere on a tweet, you pay every time someone likes your tweet or retweets or even just clicks the image to enlarge etc. Good for exposure and also in a two part funnel where you engagement farm with viral type tweets to narrow an audience and then set up a second campaign targeting “users that previously engaged with your tweets” with something like a follower campaign.
- Followers is good to build a targeted audience. Unlike Facebook advertisers are able to get organic content in front of their audience so once you’ve built an audience they will see your future tweets. This can be very effective for long-term content based campaigns and vanity metrics.
On the next page there is the option to set up “Campaign budget optimization” and you should. I tend to give each campaign a total budget and then a daily budget at the ad group level on the next page.
The next step is to create an ad group and turn “Autobid” off which is like writing a blank cheque and asking the ad delivery engine to rip you off. Also ignore the bid suggestion as this will vary greatly depending on your targeted locations. A follower in the United States is going to cost multiples of what a follower in a 3rd world country will cost.
Next let’s get into targeting….
Targeting Twitter Ads
Demographics for a crypto audience is young males. These are the stats from my YouTube channel:
So that’s a good place to start:
If there’s a benefit to gaining high net worth individuals a target age of 25-49 may work better.
Next we have country or region targeting. Here is the information from Twitter Financial Services documentation: “Cryptocurrency products and services may target limited countries subject to local laws. The countries that can be targeted are: Australia, Austria, Argentina, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, Poland, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, UK and USA”
If we are doing anything that requires connecting Metamask we want to only target desktop users otherwise Android & iOS are fine too.
My favourite targeting method is follower look-alikes which let’s you target followers of accounts in the niche. If you enter a few industry names and hit recommend you’ll get lots of suggestions to choose from.
When choosing followers try and keep them well targeted. Someone like @APompilano would have a much broader audience than @CryptoCred who would be a better choice for anything to do with crypto trading. Newer accounts are better than older accounts because the people that followed someone a year ago might already be rekt and not interested.
Finally turn everything optional off in the placements section as that doesn’t usually result in good traffic.
How To Create Effective Twitter Ads
Standard marketing principles hold true when creating Twitter ads for crypto campaigns. Benefits to the user are much more interesting than a list of product features. Why should the viewer care?
Ideally you want an ad that narrows down your target audience. In the examples below notice how I use the image which is most prominent to call out Solidity developers which is my ideal targeted audience.
In the text we have a hook at the start outlining why users should care. We then go on to pitch our product based on the benefits to the user, what they are getting. Finally we have a call to action telling the viewer what they need to do next. Emojis and hashtags are used to make it pop but overdoing this can have a negative effect.
The main thing is to test lots of different ads and see what works.
Optimization Of Ad Campaigns
We submit the campaign and wait for it to be approved. Note that the link reviewer may be US based so if you have any links to external sites there needs to be an exception for geo blocking due to securities regulations.
Campaigns are normally live within a few hours but it can take up to 48hrs and new accounts tend to take a bit longer to get running. Once it’s live you’ll get a email and start seeing some stats in your tracking platform.
Here is an example that despite we have language set to “English” engagement is much higher for native English speaking countries. It could be that the other country targeting is damaging the overall campaign performance so we could split these up and separate each country into a separate ad group with optimised bidding.
We can also optimize our ad performance, pausing any ads that don’t perform well and creating variations of the ones that do to try and tweak out the very best click through rates.
Further Opportunities
There are further opportunities to expand campaigns and improve tracking using the event manager which works via a tracking pixel which is placed on a external website. In web3 there are valid security and privacy concerns which often makes this impossible.
Setting up a tracking pixel means we can track conversion events and also build custom audiences such as website visitors and then show ads to people that have visited the site.
Retargeting ads are normally some of the most effective because they target a warm lead rather than someone that has never heard of you before.
It’s also possible to expand an audience using the targeting options which will then target campaigns to people who match a machine learning algorithm of the users that visit your site. This type of advertising while raising privacy concerns is exceptionally effective and a good method to scale up volumes.
