Last week I commented on Facebook´s new News Feed feature. Well, it seems Twitter is undergoing some changes, too.
Following a few months of testing, Twitter announced on its blog the launch of a new feature, allowing advertisers to target Twitter users based on their browsing outside of the social network. The product is aimed at making ads more useful, while helping advertisers improve their performance.
Through the so-called “tailored audiences” feature, a hotel brand, for example, can reveal a promotion via a tweet to people with Twitter accounts who like to travel and who have recently visited its site. This can happen when the brand, together with an ads partner, provides Twitter with browser-related data. What´s more, advertisers will also be able to receive information about the number of clicks on the ad.
Twitter said that the results of its beta testing, which started in July this year, showed that advertisers using the feature had achieved very good outcomes. After Hubspot used the “tailored audiences” feature, it reported a 45% jump in engagement rates. Another company, cloud-based application performance management solutions provider New Relic, achieved a 195% increase in conversion rates.
The network noted that it has a number of approved partners, which are large technology firms, and that brands can choose one of them in order to get help in the transfer of audiences to Twitter.
In case a Twitter user does not want to receive tailored ads, they can go to privacy settings and uncheck the box next to “Promoted content”. In addition, when users have set a Do Not Track (DNT) privacy preference in their web browsers, Twitter will not be able to receive a browser cookie ID from its ad partners.
Twitter sees the new feature as a way of connecting with already-interested consumers. Will you be applying it to your marketing mix?
By Ben Hollom