In this article I share three types of twitter ads that have been most effective and provide the best return on ad spend.
- Twitter Ads [Video]
- Follower Lookalike
- Custom Audiences Retargeting & Lists
- Video Views
- Twitter Ads Tips
- Conclusion
Twitter Ads [Video]
This video demonstrates the setting up of a follower lookalike Twitter ads campaign along with how to create the ads and optimise performance.
Follower Lookalike
Follower lookalike targeting is what I use for most new campaigns. I’ll go through the relevant influencers for an industry at that time and build a list of usernames to target.
In this example you can see of collected a list of accounts relevant to the WallStreetBets community which I’m running ads to for this project:
Separating Signal From Noise on WallStreetBets [Niche Website]
The quality of the targeting is directly a result of the quality of research that goes into creating this list. For effective campaigns you want to check the post interaction of each account. Do their latest tweets get likes, retweets and comments in-line with what you’d expect from an account with that many followers.
The higher the engagement rate compared to follower count the more highly targeted the resulting advertising audience segment. This is because accounts with a large number of followers and little engagement tend to have a lot of bot traffic and follow back type accounts which we don’t want to advertise to.
Come up with a good list of users that have a real audience in the sector.
Custom Audiences Retargeting & Lists
This is the most effective advertising strategy for a return on ad spend perspective. It does however have limited opportunity to scale up because you are effectively advertising to an existing limited audience.
- Retargeting allows you to place a tracking pixel on your website and then show different types of twitter ads to anyone that visits that site.
- Lists allow marketers to upload a customer list and then advertise to accounts that are setup using the same email.
Both these methods provide low hanging fruit for marketing professionals and agencies to provide a quick win for their clients. Campaigns generally convert much better with a warm audience who is already aware of the business or brand.
The ads on retargeting and list campaigns tend to perform much better across the board with higher engagement and lower CPC’s.
At £0.0018 / click I am almost advertising for free using retargeting ads. The only issue is that I can’t scale this up easily because there’s a limited audience size.
Video Views
Video ads are highly engaging and provide the best story telling platform for brands to communicate with potential customers.
When creating video ads it’s important to be concise and convey value early. The best ads show how the viewer will benefit within watching the first 3 seconds of the ad. Twitter actually recommends ads don’t exceed 15 seconds for the highest engagement. It’s really important to keep video ads short and to the point.
On Twitter there are 5 different types of video ads but for the most part advertisers will want to stick to the standard promoted video ads.
- Promoted Video – Standard video ads in timeline
- Amplify Pre-roll – Ads play before content with skip button @ 6 sec
- Amplify Sponsorship – Specific influencer deals
- First View – Single day managed placements
- Promoted Live Video – Live content ads
Video Specs
Resolution: 1200 x 1200
Frame Rate: 30fps
Max Length: 2min 20sec
Max File Size: Max 1GB
File Types: MP4 or MOV
I’d recommend using Pexels.com for free stock footage and DaVinci Resolve for editing and putting together video ads.
Start with a 1200 x 1200 timeline and drop in product or stock footage. You want a change of scene at least every 3 seconds to keep interest. Add text or subtitles as a lot of the time audio wont be on. Convey value and talk about benefits not features. End with a call to action.
Twitter Ads Tips
- Avoid “follower” building campaigns. It’s a vanity metric and not effective for performance marketing campaigns in my experience.
- Combination campaigns can work well such as a broad video view campaign which is then retargeted with a campaign focusing on website clicks or app installs for example.
- When setting up the ad group always set a maximum bid. The automatic bidding is daylight robbery. Also set conversion focused optimisation if you have it set up on your site.
- Carrier targeting on mobile devices can help segment specific demographics. Premium mobile phone networks tend to have a different user base compared to pay as you go networks.
- Retargeting pixels can be set up on 3rd party websites. In the past I’ve had success with getting buysellads to place a twitter ads pixel on the site I’m advertising on which I can then retarget with Twitter ads. This effectively purchases a custom audience from the publisher.
- Avoid the Twitter Audience Platform (TAP), it’s a network of 3rd party sites and apps that has some issues.
- You can use the Twitter Composer to schedule tweets in advance. I keep a “Tweets2Go” document which I just brain dump into when I have something on my mind. Then I’ll upload these via the composer to be sent out over the course of a year.
https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising/tweet-composer.html
- Threads do really well on Twitter and are a great way to build an audience. Use something like this in your first tweet then click the + button to add additional content.
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Thread
👇👇👇👇👇👇
- Emojis when used sparingly work well to increase visibility and draw attention to a text based tweet.
- Test variations of a tweet by creating “promoted only” versions. Simple changes such as adding an emoji or changing some wording can increase the engagement rate and be the difference between an ad that blows up and one that never gets out of the Twitter ads sandbox.
- If you have issues with ad approval or any queries then the support email is actually responsive and helpful compared to other advertising networks [email protected]
Conclusion
If you haven’t tried running Twitter ads yet then you can get started at:
If you have an existing customer list or are able to place a retargeting pixel then start with these campaigns. From there you can start to use follower-lookalike and video ads to build out and scale up your Twitter advertising.
Like any ad platform it takes some time and budget to learn what works and what doesn’t. Expect to be optimising campaigns and reiterating on what’s working on a regular basis.
Hopefully these 3 types of Twitter ads will provide a starting point for some highly profitable Twitter ad campaigns 👍
