In this article we will walk you through the key steps of getting set up and launching a Twitter paid advertising campaign.
A Few Basic Pointers
Before we go on to talk about Twitter’s paid advertising offering, it is worth mentioning how to improve your coverage organically (i.e. for free).
- You should aim to tweet once a day with a piece of content relating to your business or industry sector.
- Have a pinned tweet at the top of your timeline to highlight your key products or services or any seasonal / ad-hoc promotions.
- Keep an eye on trending hashtags, and try to tweet using ones that are directly related to your business or sector, or on a subject that will portray a positive message for your business. When using trending hashtags always make sure you understand the context of why a hashtag is trending.
Advertising On Twitter
To advertise on Twitter you must have a Twitter account.
Twitter Advertising Terminology
It is useful to get a grasp of the terminology Twitter uses for its advertising campaigns, which you can reference using the Twitter Ads Glossary
Accessing Your Twitter Ads Dashboard
When you have signed into your Twitter account, to access the ads dashboard go to: https://ads.twitter.com
Note: If you have previously used the service, or have any ads saved as drafts it will take you to your dashboard. If not click the ‘I want to launch a Twitter Ads campaign’ option.
Advertising Campaign Structure
The structure of an advertising campaign on Twitter is:
1. CAMPAIGN > 2. AD GROUP > 3. CREATIVES
- CAMPAIGN: this is your overall objective i.e. to increase followers, website clicks etc.
- AD GROUP: Each campaign has one or more ad groups that sit inside of it and focus on specific targeting criteria. It’s perfectly normal to start out with one ad group in a campaign.
- CREATIVES: This is the actual ad that sits inside an ad group, which will be in a tweet form, with its related text and visuals.
1. CAMPAIGN
The campaign is your overall objective and Twitter will ask you what you wish to achieve.
CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES
- Followers
- Website Clicks
- App Installs or App Re-Engagments
- Tweet Engagements
- Reach
- Video Views or In-stream Video Views
In this tutorial we will choose ‘Website Clicks’.
You will then add some campaign details such as naming the campaign and setting an overall budget for the campaign.
2. AD GROUPS
AD GROUP SET UP
Within your ad groups the first thing you will do is set up your ad group details – this covers specifics such as the Ad Group name, optional start and end date if necessary, and the ad group bid type.
The bid type recommend as a beginner is the default ‘Automatic bid’ type so you can get a feel for the cost per click and related results. You can always edit this when a campaign is running. You can also select maximum and target cost bids to ensure you don’t go over a certain bid price per click.
AD GROUP TARGETING
After setting up your ad group details, you will focus on ad group targeting. You target your ad groups by Audience, Demographics and Audience Features.
AUDIENCE: (We won’t be using this feature in this tutorial). If targeting by a pre-defined Audience (such as an email list), you will need to have first set up custom audiences under Tools > Audience Manager in the main toolbar at the top of dashboard.
DEMOGRAPHICS: This covers options such as gender, age, location, languages and technology. When using the technology option you can target users by device or operating system, which is a key feature if you have a campaign focused on app installs or app engagements.
AUDIENCE FEATURES: This covers the topics of Keywords, Events, Interests, Follower look-alikes, Movies, and TV shows. Some useful guidelines on these are:
- Keywords — This will target people who’ve searched for, tweeted or engaged with specific keywords. Twitter recommends at least 25 keywords.
- Interests — It is advised you only use one or two interests.
- Follower look-alikes — This allows you to select accounts and target followers with similar profiles. This type of campaign is best done as a separate campaign with only this feature enabled.
3. CREATIVES
Creatives are, in simple terms, your actual ads that sit inside your ad groups.
Twitter gives you the choice of using existing tweets, or creating a new tweet (a more popular option) for an ad group, which is what we will be doing. The first thing you need to do is select ‘Create tweet’.
When creating a promoted tweet you must ensure the default ‘promoted-only’ box is checked otherwise your tweet will just go out as a normal tweet.
Below the main text box you then get the option to add images, a video, a twitter card or create a poll for the tweet. Twitter cards are designed for campaigns which have the campaign objective of website clicks. Using Twitter cards instead of standard image has the advantage allowing you to turn the image into a link to your site / web page instead of just using text as a link, thus increasing conversions.
To set up a twitter card, in the main dashboard toolbar go to Creatives > Cards > Create Card
When you have created your card, and any additional text you are using in the tweet, you can ‘schedule’ the tweet, or ‘tweet’ the tweet.
Note: If you select ‘tweet’ (i.e. you’re not scheduling it for a specific date), this promoted tweet will not go out until you launch the campaign at the end of the process we are going through.
When a tweet is finished you must go back into ‘Creatives’ part of your Ad Group and select the ‘Scheduled Tweets‘ or ‘Promoted only Tweets’ from the dropdown (dependent on whether you chose to ‘schedule’ or ‘tweet’ the tweet in the previous step).
You must tick the checkbox next to the relevant tweet you wish to use.
DELETING TWEETS: If you wish to delete a tweet associated with an ad group, go to Creatives > Tweets on the main dashboard toolbar, and then click on the date of the tweet. This will then take you to the tweet itself. Click the down arrow in the top right of the tweet and select ‘Delete’.
4. Campaign Review
At the end of your campaign set up Twitter takes you to the Campaign Review, which gives you a summary of everything you’ve done. It’s always worth checking through this and/or getting a colleague to check it as well.
If you are happy with everything you can hit the ‘Launch Campaign’ button in the top right of the dashboard to make your Twitter ads campaign go live.
