Maximizing ROI for Twitter Ads #SMX

Bryan Sise, Kayt Zelley and Abishek Shrivastava — three VIPs from Twitter — share DATA-DRIVEN tips and strategies for maximizing your ROI on Twitter in this SMX West 2016 session. Let’s get to it!

Using Twitter’s Unique Data

Control studies show that promoted tweets build intent and drive conversions. Twitter found a 3.2X lift in conversion rate for people who engage with a Twitter ad vs. those that did not.

Turn everyday moments into action. Let’s say a woman is looking at her Twitter feed in a café. We know who she’s engaging with, what she’s interested in, etc. Let’s say she says she’s looking forward to her morning coffee.

As you think about mentions of the keyword coffee, what looks seemingly random is actually predictable – as you might expect on the weekdays and mornings, coffee has high frequency. But surprisingly, it also has peaks on weekend evenings. Know the patterns for your keywords

Let’s say you set up a campaign and target the keywords coffee, Peet’s, and Starbucks to target people who are thinking about coffee. Then, just seconds after the woman tweets about her love of coffee, your tweet will show up in her timeline. All of this happens live – it’s important that you’re able to capture signals like this live and connect in real time, while they’re thinking about keywords that relate to what you offer. That’s how you connect.

Twitter is your live connection to billions of signals of interest and intent. “It’s your live connection to you customer in all the places they go,” says Sise.

Performance Marketing Scenarios

Europlore

Let’s say it’s Paris in the summertime. Your business is Europlore Tours and you offer vacation packages and cultural tours in European cities. It’s March, and only 12 or your 60 slots are booked for the Paris tour. You want to fully book the Paris tour before it starts in May. Here’s how Twitter recommends leveraging ads in this scenario:

1. Mine everyday conversations with keyword targeting in the timeline.
   When a Twitter user takes to Twitter to muse about an upcoming trip, saying “Starting to plan my family vacation. Should I go to France or Italy?” Your promoted tweet with a website card then shows up with a clear CTA to book a tour with Europlore.
2. Cross sell to current customers.
   Use your own data (cookie ids, email addresses, phone numbers) to form a matched audience with Twitter users, and then target accordingly. Set up a campaign with that tailored audience. There, you can add additional forms of target such as device or gender.
3. Ensure visibility into cross-device conversions.
   Use the website tag and cross-device conversion analytics. It’s very common, in this scenario with Europlore, for a user to do quick research on their phone but actually make the purchase on desktop.

Dog Star Adventure Gear

Dog Star Adventure is a retail outdoor and sporting goods online and physical store. They’re launching a new store section dedicated to climbing gear and apparel. How can they cost-effectively drive climbing gear purchases and capture market share?

1. Appeal to people’s passions with @username targeting.
   Imagine Twitter user Sheri. She reads parenting blogs, is concerned with the environment, and likes to climb. In fact, she follows @ClimbMagazine. Dog Star can target people following @ClimbMagazine. The ad that is served can show up outside chronological order. It can also show up for users that accounts are not following.
2. Retarget at the product level with Dynamic Product Ads (currently in Beta).
   In the most valuable minutes after a user has seen a product on your site, you can serve them an ad. Let’s say Sheri is on the Dog Star site looking at shoes. The next time she logs into Twitter, she becomes eligible to see that same product front and center on her timeline.

3. Increase reach and scale with the Twitter Audience Platform (currently in Beta).

Tweet Copy Best Practices

The Do’s

• Convey urgency. Tweets that use urgency words have a 10% lower CPA and a 10% link click rate.
• Mention percentages over dollars for discounts. Tweets that advertise percentage discounts have a 40 lower CPA than tweets that advertise dollar based discounts.
• Highlight new items. Tweets with “new” have a 10% lower CPA and a 23% higher link click rate.
• Pose a question. Tweets that ask a question have a 9 percent lower cost per click and a 16% higher link click rate.

The Don’ts

• Don’t overuse capitals. Tweets that overuse capital letters have a 2% higher CPA and a 9% lower click rate. When you use caps people feel like you are yelling at them.
• Don’t user @mentions. Tweets that mention another handle have a 6% lower click rate a 3% percent high cost per link click.

The Future of Twitter ads

People are spending more and more time on mobile. People are in a rush on mobile. They use moments of found time: between meetings, on elevators, on a train ride. Flurry data show that people who open an app more than 60 times a day has grown by 123%. People have very brief moments to experience your brand.

The world, however, is not a mobile world – it’s a multi-device world. Forrester Research shows average U.S. consumer aged 24-25 uses four devices. They switch attention across devices seamlessly. Therefore, you need to determine where they’re most likely to convert. Marketers need to take a new approach to make marketing work. Address short attention spans by turning moments into action with real-time targeting and running native ads.

Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound, professional copywriter, and social (media) butterfly. Currently, she is a senior SEO content writer for Conde Nast. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Formerly, she was the social media editor at Bruce Clay Inc.

See Kristi's author page for links to connect on social media.