Twitter Ads: Do they work?
Is the Twitter Ads platform worth investing in?
To start with, I have been managing Twitter ad campaigns on several accounts (with a variable product set) for some time now. Almost all of the accounts are based on lower-funnel conversion targets. There are some campaigns targeted towards brand promotion but they are rather few.
Most of the time clients wants to test Twitter Ads when they want to expand or test it as an alternative platform to Google Ads or Facebook Ads. In my experience, I had only one client who didn’t have any facebook presence and was marketing only on Twitter.
In case you are wondering, it was doing rather well.
The platform has its benefits and its disadvantages as well. Here are a few:
Pros
- Very low CPC for brand promotion campaigns: You can successfully run tweet engagement campaigns for very low budgets.
- Custom Audience Sets that can target Keywords and Handles, interests, etc: You can literally target users and the followers. It comes in handy if you are trying to target certain demographics like HRs, VPs, Influencers etc.
- You can target events and people talking about live stuff happening in real time.
- Device-level targeting: Not sure who would want to use it, but it can help if you are planning to run specific app install campaigns.
- App install campaigns do fairly well.
- Older generation audience can be targeted which is different from some other Ad platforms.
- Twitter staff is very supportive.
Cons
- No custom conversion integration: You can only add URL based custom events but anything beyond that is too high tech for Twitter ads platform.
- The platform breaks often in terms of recording conversions: this affects the campaigns that have set “conversion” as their optimizing event.
- Google TAG integration rarely works: if you are planning to implement the pixel in Google TAG manager, it probably is not the best idea. I have seen the output being unpredictable in terms of recording conversions.
- Mobile spends more than desktop targeting but also doesn’t convert as much.
- Irregular spending patterns: As mentioned above, the platform does not have consistent spending behavior. Example: There was no increase in daily budget on the account. The platform failed to spend daily budget everyday except this one day where it decided to spend $1100 ( total daily budget). It would be fine if there were equivalent number of conversion but that was not the case.
- The way to create creatives (website Cards) is cumbersome. It makes it difficult to launch a lot of creatives at the same time. aka too much manual work.
- The platform favors “new creatives”: it gets too much because you will see a decline in performance for longer running creatives and re-uploading them in new campaigns is not an option. Which means, if a company doesn’t have constant inflow of new creatives assets, this platform is probably not the best for you.
- Videos never work: Videos are the best type of creatives in platforms line “facebook” and “instagram”. If you are running a tweet engagement campaign, thats fine. However, if you are looking for conversions on videos, thats rare.
- No CTA option in promoted tweets. Yes cards are a form of CTA but you can’t be innovative with them except changing your headlines.
In due course of time, i have had several conversations with Twitter team to mention all the issues, but the engineering team seems to be not aligned with the current market requirements of having a reliable and scalable ads platform.
To summarize, It is worth trying the ads platform as it has its own unique things to offer but keep in mind that the tool is not as refined as you would expect a company like Twitter to produce.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.
Any feed back is greatly appreciated.
