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)..
The vendor needs to fit the client so the reason I worked with them was that they were not too big or too small for our organization. Also, they were more likely to adapt to our workflow which is great as some vendors in this space wanted us to conform to their processes, which was not wanted.
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.
Campaign set up in our ad server at the time, 27/7 Real Media's OAS platform.
Post-campaign reporting.
Our main point of contact, I believe her name was Nafisa, was extremely friendly and became an extension of the team. She really was fun to work with and professional.
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.
They had their own ad server and there were regular efforts to get us to move to that ad server which was not industry standard at the time. We already an agreement in place with OAS and also used DFP via agency access but they pushed to use this server and it was not something I really needed to keep discussing with them.
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.
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.
I worked with a company called Asentech whose core competence at the time was not campaign management. Zedo replaced them and did a great job. I have since evaluated Theorem, OAO and YourBow and Zedo offers as much if not more than those companies.
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.
At the beginning of the month, we had a crush of new campaigns to launch and they stepped up their game to get this accomplished. Also, reporting was done very quickly with a lot of insight into campaign optimization.
