Item: Twitter Ads
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The upper funnel Paid Social team uses Twitter ads for brand awareness campaigns, but I, in Performance Marketing use Twitter Ads for retargeting users. We were targeting users who abandoned our site without booking a hotel to bring them back and complete their booking.

Pros and Cons

Target specific audiences - site visitors, specific countries, and demographics
Reach users within the right frequency - not over expose our ads, but just the right amount to result in a conversion
Twitter is able to show a tweet with an image, and now they can show carousel images, videos ect.

Ads cannot be dynamic based on information the pixel is capturing on our audiences from our site - example: showing real-time pricing in the ad copy, or as an overlay on the image.
Twitter cannot target by language, only by country. This means certain foreign speakers in countries may not find our ad to be relevant since it's not being shown in their preferred language.
Twitter has very limited capabilities to show you cross-device attribution. They can see when a user engaged on mobile and converted on desktop, and vice-versa, but this audience is limited to only a fraction of people logged into Twitter on multiple devices, not all of them.

Return on Investment

Twitter's overall performance proved to be successful according to Twitter Ads Manager reporting.
Twitter was not successful from a last-click perspective - even though this was for a large global retargeting campaign, users were still in the consideration phase when seeing our ads and converted on a last-click basis from a different marketing channel funded by our company.

Alternatives Considered

We selected Twitter Ads because our paid social marketing team runs various upper funnel tactics that perform very well on this platform.

Likelihood to Recommend

These were described in great detail in previous examples in this survey, but overall, Twitter has not kept up with the trends its competitors have conquered. Facebook is able to track cross-device behavior (at a cost through AMT), it has the ability to target based on language, and is able to dynamically insert pricing into its ads, in the text or in the images, based on the product(s) the user has expressed interest in, making their advertising efforts very relevant to users and increasing a higher conversion rate propensity.

Usability

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.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Easy to use Technical support not required Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	Not well integrated

Easy Tasks

Using filters in the reporting UI
Downloading the reporting in Excel to analyze on my own

Difficult Tasks

Knowing how to calculate cross-device attribution without making up our own formulas
Not every metric exists, just the basic ones. Twitter is not as robust as Facebook.

Twitter Ads for Performance Marketing

Overall Satisfaction with Twitter Ads