Your Business Should Be Testing Twitter's 6 Retargeting Ad Features

When it comes to social ads, Facebook is the leader of the pack. But, increasingly so, Twitter has been upping their game with an quickly improving social advertising feature set.

What I wanted to share with you today is the extent to which custom audiences are available on Twitter and other targeting options.

That’s right, my conversion-obsessed friends. You can currently get FIVE types of retargeting on twitter without having to get on your knees to get on some private beta list (like we do) or go through one of the ad partners.

Go log into your Twitter ads account and follow along.

This is my personal account here, not any of the special brand accounts we manage.

That’s FIVE types of custom audiences.

1. Emails
2. Twitter usernames
3. Twitter user IDs
4. Mobile ad IDs
5. Phone numbers

There is also website remarketing, like on Facebook, which came out on Twitter in June 2014. Grab your pixels here.

So technically, you have 6 types of remarketing.

The main targeting type you’ll use here is email addresses, the first option listed.

How to think about twitter’s remarketing performance

Compared to Facebook custom audience tools, Twitter’s match rate (the number of emails, phone numbers, etc you can match to a Twitter profile) will be lower. And that the traffic you get will be much smaller.

Twitter has a much smaller user base (250 million versus 1.5 billion– though it differs by vertical/geo) and users aren’t checking Twitter 14 times a day, like on Facebook mobile (except for a tiny audience of power users of course).

With Facebook, we get a 70% email match rate on consumer companies and perhaps 15% for B2B.

Expect 10-20% of this on Twitter, so if your list isn’t at least 10,000 emails, it might not be worth your time yet.

This is the equivalent of focusing your search engine efforts on Google before moving to another search engine, like Bing or Yahoo, for ads or SEO.

Test with Facebook first.

When you’re doing social ad retargeting, your performance has nothing to do with Twitter’s ability to let you filter down on followers, hashtags, and keywords. These are people you already have in your email list and have been to your website.

So the approximately $10 CPM you’ll pay on the traffic in the United States, similar to the CPM on Facebook in the newsfeed, means that you’ll kick butt on Twitter if your email list and web traffic are clean.

Get web remarketing set up

For your website remarketing, go to the “tools” section, click on “conversion tracking,” and either create new or edit existing website tags.

At the bottom of each tag you configure, you get the option to use that pixel for remarketing.

Sneaky, isn’t it?

While Facebook allows us to pass through attributes and specify booleans in their website pixels like here, Twitter doesn’t have this feature yet. This gets a little advanced, but is just another sign that Twitter is still trying to catch up to Facebook’s rich targeting feature set.

In plain English: you have to create one tag per website audience.

I’m not here to bash Twitter or say that Facebook is better.

Just expect that Twitter is rapidly rolling out awesome tools, just like Facebook is copying ad management features from Google AdWords.

Social ad remarketing has different names across platforms

Facebook calls these custom audiences.

Twitter calls these tailored audiences.

LinkedIn is rolling these out soon.

Same thing with paying to promote native social posts

Facebook calls sponsored post or promoted posts.

Twitter calls them promoted tweets.

LinkedIn calls them sponsored updates.

Objective-based social ads with retargeting, an industry standard

Whether you call it a post, a Tweet, a pin, a status, or whatever — you can do remarketing against it.

And then tie them to a business objective — website clicks, conversions, social engagement, app installs, or other goals.

Here is the objective-based buying flow for a Twitter ad campaign.

A nice copy of Facebook’s!

Someday we’ll be able to buy all retargeting on one place (note to AdRoll and Perfect Audience folks reading this– this means having marketing automation logic eventually drive all retargeting).

But for now, you should take a close look at testing Twitter’s awesome remarketing feature set. More social marketers need to be aware of this and testing it as an option.

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Understanding Facebook Insights & Twitter Analytics

In a previous article, we started talking about the importance of knowing how and why it’s necessary to continually be monitoring and analyzing your social media analytics. When I first began testing, I wasn’t ready to delve into tools and putting budget towards analytics just yet. Luckily, Twitter and Facebook have been doing more and more to allow users to monitor results on their platforms while in the app (or desktop).

Keep in mind – you have the ability to track almost any kind of data imaginable. That doesn’t mean that all is necessary and relevant to YOU. Sort through the data to determine what is most important for you to learn about your community to help further your ability to reach your goals and grow your engagement.

Facebook Insights

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Each admin of a Facebook page has access to insights. You can find these by clicking the Insights tab in the Menu bar at the top of your page. This will give you ‘insight’ into your posts, your fans and your reach.

There are many things you can look at in Insights: weekly reach, how well each post has done, what is being looked at the longest…There are six ways Facebook breaks down the information:

1. Overview – this shows how your page is doing, how many new “likes” you received, and how each post was received, how many people engaged with it, what times they saw it, how many people shared the content…
2. Likes – This shows you how many new likes you have received and how many people have un-liked the page. If you are doing an ad campaign on Facebook, this is where you will see how many organic vs paid likes you have received.
3. Reach – this data tells you how many people saw each piece of content you posted, if anyone liked it, clicked on it or shared it.
4. Visits –  looking at visits will show you the number of times the different tabs on your page (photos tab, info tab, timeline, etc.) were viewed, and how any times people came to your page from a website outside of Facebook.
5. Posts – this might be the most important piece to look at. Posts show you a breakdown of the days and times your fans are online, the paid and organic reach of your posts, as well as interactions with them i.e. comments or likes.
6. People - I like to break down the people that like my brand’s pages. You are able to see the gender of the people that like that certain page, as well as their age and locations. Having demographic data for your community can further help you tailor your content to relate the most to them. Some people call this “creating target audience personas,” but I’m not a huge fan of that term.

Facebook Audience Insights

               You can further break down the information on all the people that have “liked” your Facebook page. There are five ways Facebook has broken down this information: Demographics, Page Likes, Location and Language, Facebook usage (are your visitors coming from mobile, desktop, etc) and Activity (are people coming to your page to shop? Just to gather info?)

Once you become more comfortable looking at and analyzing this data, it will help show you what sort of content your audience is looking for from you, so you know what to post more of or less of. This information will also give you a better idea of what you might want to spend money on: posts that might be worth “boosting,” or whether you should begin Facebook Ads at any certain time.

This is just the beginning of all the Facebook Insights offers. Which insights have you found to be most helpful?

Twitter Analytics

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Midway through 2015, Twitter rolled out their native analytics platform, available to all Twitter users. In Twitter Analytics, you are provided with a 28 day review of the response for each tweet – what people have RTd, mentioned, clicked on and marked as a favorite.

Just like Facebook Insights, Twitter offers you a variety of measurable metrics. The options that I have found most useful are:

1. Tweet Activity -  If you click on any individual tweet, you are shown all the engagement on that tweet, including clicks on URLs if there is one in the post, how many people clicked your username in response to reading that specific tweet, and clicks on images if there is one in the post, expanded details.
   1. This is further broken down into 3 sections:
      1. Impressions – here you can choose a date range to see how many impressions you have received on your tweets. It is broken down by organic impressions and paid (promoted tweets, ads, etc) You are kept within a 91 day (random) window for the dates you can choose to analyze. Most valuable here could be the “Impressions by Time of Day,” so you know moving forward, when most of your community is available to speak with!
      2. Engagements – There are no filters here, but you are given a wide range of information including: Impressions, Retweets, Replies, Favorites, and User Profile Clicks. What I have found interesting is how many times I have had a tweet retweeted, without the person actually opening the link included in the tweet. In my eyes, I see this as people beginning to have trust in what I (or my brands/clients) are tweeting and see it as beneficial. Also, that could show that certain words and headlines resonate with our community.
2. Followers – This might be my favorite analytic on the Twitter interface. Not only can you see the demographics of your followers, their marital status and location, you can further break down the information via the Lifestyle tab. The information here shows you the Top 10 interests of your followers. By learning the subjects your followers tweet about the most, you are then able to join conversations about things that interest them, find things you have in common with to help begin engagement, and get a better understanding of the content your followers would be most interested in receiving from you.

Have you checked out your Twitter Analytics Dashboard yet? I’d love to hear what information and what tabs have been most meaningful to you. Tweet me @lucyrk78 and share some of your data with me!

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