Twitter has formally unleashed its new remarketing feature to advertisers, following a five-month testing window beginning in July. Tailored Audiences will enable marketers to display promoted content to people who have previously expressed an interest in their brands outside of the Twitter environment.
With this update, cookie-based data collected by Twitter-verified technology partners can now be added to advertisers’ targeting strategies. Advertisers can direct unique messaging depending on the pixel implementations. Twitter’s global remarketing solution differs from that of Facebook in that advertisers can utilize the feature across mobile devices as well as desktop/PC.
Beta tests with advertising partners demonstrated promising results. According to Twitter, one tester saw a 45 percent lift in engagement rate. A second experienced a 74 percent decrease in CPA, and a third saw a 195 percent higher conversion rate.
Advertisers can target multiple audiences per campaign and view audience-level reporting. Anywhere an ad’s partner can collect cookie IDs is a potential source for building audiences. For example, an entertainment marketer could target Promoted Account campaigns to visitors of show or film homepages, or show highly-targeted tune-in creative to those same visitors.
Users can opt out of Twitter remarketing by de-selecting the associated box within their privacy settings. Twitter will not match personal accounts to information shared by ad partners, nor will it receive browser data from people who have Do Not Track (DNT) settings enabled in their browsers.
Brands currently working with Twitter’s ten initial technology partners stand to benefit in the near-term. Those companies are: Adara, AdRoll, BlueKai, Chango, DataXu, Dstillery, Lotame, Quantcast, ValueClick or [x+1]. The remarketing feature will present an especially good opportunity for direct response marketers to reach relevant audiences on Twitter.
If the goal is expanded reach, advertisers should be excited about insights gleaned from early beta testing results that suggest a 400 percent reach expansion with the remarketing feature. (This estimate assumes 20 percent of website visitors are reachable on Twitter and 30 percent use of Twitter during campaign flight.)
Advertisers can continue to layer targeting (e.g. Geo, Device and Gender) with this feature and should continue creative/messaging testing for the best engagement on Twitter. Further targeting enhancements for remarketing are in beta and are expected to roll-out in early Q1.
Cover photo via VentureBeat.