Smaato is a supply-side publisher platform (SSP) from the Verve Group since the 2021 acquisition.
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X Ads
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Formerly Twitter Ads, X Ads is a search engine marketing tool built around features such as objective-based campaigns, promoted trends, and in-depth analytics.
Smaato is very well suited for user acquisition and retargeting companies. Their overlap in terms of audiences and publishers with other exchanges is very limited, which makes it a great alternative when you need to scale a campaign and want to maintain your frequency cap. They work very well in branding campaigns as well as performance campaigns.
I highly recommend Twitter Ads for users looking to establish a strong online presence on the platform and the digital sphere. While a little on the expensive side, the payoff, in the long run, is quite remarkable especially that Twitter Ads will show your content to all the followers gained (while other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, use algorithms that might place your daily content lower or won't even show them to your fans)..
Twitter Ads, just like every form of internet ads, enable us to target users based on their geographical location. This has been very vital for occasions when we are trying to raise awareness about new products specifically tailored for customers and clients from a particular location.
Twitter Ads is significantly more cost effective than traditional adverts we run on mainstream TV stations and newspapers, especially since most of our campaigns majorly target the younger generation. Of this group, we are aware that the younger generation in South Africa spend more time on the internet than they ever do sitting behind their TV set or even reading newspapers.
Twitter Ads makes it possible to engage live with Twitter users as they view our ad campaigns. This allows us to clarify information , respond to questions and even qualify leads while our campaign is running. This obviously is not possible with traditional mediums of advertisement.
While the targeting of Twitter is relevant most of the time, it is not always right and there are some ads that are completely unrelated to the search terms entered.
Smaato has a UI where you can control your line items on the traffic you want to receive. That is a key unique selling point that other SSPs don't offer. Most of the items that you will need like reporting can be done on a self serve manner and that is a big plus, specifically for changes that need to happen really fast and you don't need to deal with account managers that may take some time to answer emails.
The tool is ok to use, and ads are becoming more skippable on Twitter, so we are unsure as a company if it's still a good channel for direct response messaging. It does not perform as efficiently as other social platforms for lower funnel marketing. It does well for awareness campaigns that are set and forget, but optimizing for DR is not as efficient when you are trying to manage the ads on the client side.
Smaato's account management team is very professional. They are quite fast in terms of customer support, which is very helpful. One item that stands out is that they are willing to understand what you need for each campaign and what is the best way to move forward. They don't just jump quickly into trying to upsell more of Smaato's products (audiences, data) like other SSPs do.
Facebook Ads, Adwords, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube all have ad channels you can use to advertise your product. Some are even tied together. Twitter occupies a part of the market which can be difficult to get right. Mostly, we select other channels for better targeting, cheaper leads, and a better fit for the campaigns we were trying to run. However, there are scenarios in which using Twitter Ads can get you big wins.
One Positive Impact has been that having ads running has increased the number of followers we have on Twitter.
Another positive impact is that due to having more followers, we now have more visits to our site.
A mixed impact would be that positively, since we have Adwords implemented as well, we can track back the source of our website traffic to being from a social source like Twitter. The negative of it is that Twitter ads does not have the tracking capability and we still need Google Adwords to do so.