The other day I came across a website called Squared which is:
the award-winning digital marketing course for ambitious marketing managers, bright grads and professionals looking to enter the industry. Built by the best practitioners and delivered online, we are a new movement in career learning.
Curious as to what this new offering was, as with most things related to digital marketing training or otherwise, I decided to sign up. However, I didn’t complete the application as they were asking for a £250 deposit and full payment of £1449 – at that point I lost interest. The following day I started to see promoted ads, such as the one below, appearing in my Twitter timeline.
For all users of Twitter I’m sure that you’ve seen these Promoted Tweets and there’s a good chance they are relevant to yourself. So, what is going here and how did this ad appear? Is it because of my interests or a word I mentioned in my tweets? Or could it have been because I was identified and my Twitter handle added to Twitter Ads?
Well, one thing that might have happened is they typed in my name in to the ‘Add Followers’ section of the Twitter Campaign dashboard and, hey presto, discovered my name. They may also have gone one step further (see below) and identified similar people from this search query and added them to their list.
This is perfectly feasible, though the company in question Squared would have had to search for “Alun John” and then make sure that they selected the right one – in this case it might have been relatively easy, though a little too mechanical.
Or did they use one of the following Twitter features, which are really quite something?
- Website Tag for Remarketing
- Tailored Audiences
- TV Targeting
- Device, carrier, and new mobile user targeting
Website Tag for Remarketing allows you to place code on your website and once this is in place it collects cookie ID’s of users and matches them to Twitter ID’s; this data once collected then allows you to display ads to your visitors when they visit their Twitter timeline.
Tailored Audiences is a great feature which allows you to upload information from your own audiences (think lists – email lists or mobile phone numbers) and again Twitter identifies which of these data entries corresponds to a Twitter user; then your ads can be placed on these user’s timelines. Let’s just assume that you wanted to upload customer email list you would export one of your lists, from Mailchimp for example, and import it into Twitter; your Mailchimp users would then see ads tailored to them and created within a Twitter campaign. The sort of lists you can create are the following:
The other element within Tailored Audiences that people might find of interest relates to Mobile Apps. It allows you to tailor campaigns to (or exclude) to your audience who signed up or installed an app.
TV Targeting is available to those views in certain countries (the UK, SA and Spain most others) and lets you target people according to TV show targeting: There are two options to reach people engaged with specific TV programming, TV network targeting and TV genre targeting. Device, geo-targeting and language can also be added as features.
The final option for targeting comes from Device, carrier, and new mobile user targeting. There are many options available for advertisers here including the option to focus on OS and whether people are wifi users. So as we can see the options for targeting on Twitter are varied and very exciting. Let me know if you’ve used any of them and did you achieve the objectives you set to achieve.
In the case of Squared, I assume that the way they targeted me was probably from an email list of new enquiries but from those who hadn’t quite gone through to payment!
Related Articles
Twitter ads: The beginner’s guide to Tailored Audiences
Twitter Advertising
TwitterAcademy Webinar – Ads Audience Targeting
Related Course
Social Media Marketing Course
0 Comments