Using Twitter Analytics for PPC Benefits

On May 27, 2015 Twitter Advertising updated their analytics to Audience Insights. The goal was “to help advertisers understand key audiences on Twitter.” Well not only does Twitter Analytics help your paid social efforts, but it also can give you some ideas (with data) on how to improve your PPC campaigns as well. Let’s look at a few simple ones.

Get More Insight on What Connects with Your Audience

We’re all PPC pros here right? So I’m going to assume we are always checking our ads and testing new messaging to see what best connects with the searchers. Instead of clicks and CTR, Twitter Analytics gives users Engagements and Engagement Rate to give the advertiser an idea of which tweets are making the biggest impact.

Now it’s true that most accounts that are successful on Twitter are not posting purely about their business. You have to put some fun posts up every once in awhile to personalize your brand and better relate with your audience. However for the posts that are about your services or products, you will be able to…

• See which content is the most popular. Out of all of your product tweets, was there a certain group of products that consistently engaged with users. If so, the text from the higher engaging tweets can be turned into better text ads.
• Just like a conversion, look at quality over quantity. Dig in to see if the accounts engaging with your posts are actually relevant to your business. Because the engagement is all public, you’ll be able to see which tweets are actually making an impact on your brand.

View Demographic Information

A key piece in any form of marketing is knowing your target audience. Twitter has third party matching partners to give marketers using the social media platform more information about how their target audience uses Twitter. Here are a few examples of the type of information you can see when logged in.

The image above is for a company that sells fish aquariums. The data we get (notice that it’s only a 25.1% match rate) that the majority of this company’s target audience is female. We can also see that almost 40% of their Twitter followers have a household income of $75,000 and higher. If we see the data trend on Twitter is consistent for some time, we can consider some options for our PPC campaigns such as…

• If you’re running paid social ads, you can get enough data to create an entirely new campaign targeting female users with a certain income level. Then format your ad text to speak directly to “her.”
• If you’re running any display ads, your images can show women with the aquariums. Or if you want to push the income factor, showcase your more, expensive aquariums in your images as part of a posh lifestyle to capture the attention of the elite.

Besides the two examples shown, you can also get information on interests, wireless carriers, net worth, marital status, education and home ownership.

See Which Ad Types Are Working the Best

I consider Twitter Cards to be the ad extensions of Twitter. They make your tweets stand out more, and people will interact more with tweets that have Twitter Cards than the ones that don’t.

Image courtesy of https://dev.twitter.com/cards/analytics

When using Twitter Cards, an active Twitter Ads account is not necessary. If your site is coded with the proper Twitter meta tags, you can start collecting card data immediately. Why pay for ads to test engagement if you already have a strong enough following on Twitter to get data for free?

• If you see a trend that certain kinds of images or videos are engaging users better, turn those into Display or YouTube campaigns to either build brand awareness or remarket with the visual content you know already works.
• Are your App Card metrics looking really good? Then consider expanding upon your app promotion on Google.
• Test out different images (following Google’s guidelines) for the same product in your Twitter Ads. Find the one that works best and use it in your Shopping campaigns and website.

Twitter has a wider set of data that marketers can use in addition to Google. These are only a few we’ve used with success. What other ways have you used Twitter Analytics data to help your PPC campaigns?