“You’ll run through your Twitter Ad money really quickly.”

The almost ominous words that were spoken to me by Trevor from SocialTables over coffee a couple of months ago about Twitter Ads. And boy, was he right.

During my first campaigns with Twitter Ads, I saw a ton of engagements and then I also ran through money way quicker than I thought. Almost double of what I typically spent on Facebook Ads. It scared the living daylights out of me. Granted, I didn’t run through thousands of dollars…well mainly because I always have the habit of continuously checking on our different ad campaign data. We’re still testing essentially how effective Twitter Ads are in regards to conversions to leads; however, while looking at the engagement factors there are some relevant benefits. Although the engagement is nice, to get there, you most follow some steps like any marketer to really make the ads tick…in your favor. Hence the secrets of competitive twitter ad targeting.

First Steps in Twitter Ads

1. Pick the type of campaign to set up
-Promote Your Account
-Promote Your Tweets

2. After picking the type of campaign you’ll then begin the targeting fun.

I’m going to break down the targeting that goes into promoting your tweets because I feel those are most beneficial; however, I’ll cover promoting your account after and my reasoning in picking the former.

The Secrets of Competitive Twitter Ad Targeting

After selecting the promoting your tweets option, you’ll then be directed to another page on how you would like to reach your audience.

Target by Keywords

With over 500 million users Twitter and over 400 millions tweets sent per day, it only made sense for Twitter Ads a few months ago to finally come out with targeting on keywords. I mean I was really wondering why they didn’t do it sooner. After choosing to target by keywords you’ll then be prompted to choose from a variety of other options.

1. Where do you want your ads to appear?

Users’ Timelines- This is usually the option that I typically go with because our tweets will be more likely to be engaged with people talking about things related to TrackMaven. It also will be displayed to users who have previously engaged with tweets containing the keywords that we’ve set. This option also shows up in a more “native” way as it is in the users’ timeline as opposed to at the top of the results when they are searching for a specific source.

This tweet showed up on my feed this morning. You caught me Target with your targets… (Guilty Iced Coffee Drinker right here.)

Search results- Choosing this option will display your result in the search results. Typically I don’t chose this option because it limits my target base to what people are searching on twitter. However, the when someone searches for my keywords, it also could give me a highly targeted audience who is amply ready to engage in what I’m displaying with my promoted tweets.

2. Keywords

1. Is there a blog post that attracted a lot of attention? Do you have customers now specifically asking for one thing? What is your elevator pitch and how has that been working? What are your potential and customers now looking for? What are your current keywords? Answering all of these questions will help you narrow down exactly what keywords to input into this field.

Another thing to note is with the keywords, you can match the words in any order, phrase match, exact match, negative match, negative phrase, and negative exact. Each of these can also go some ways depending on your target audience. The first thing to note is to make sure you are including the different options of phrases that people could be searching. For example if your competitor is H&M, make sure you are including the exact phrase match, but also “handm” too. Second, and most importantly, You can ultimately tag your competitor’s keywords, so for example if your competitor’s customer base is suddenly in an uproar about a feature, you can target that features keyword to your advantage. This example could backfire, so be sure you are competitively targeting keywords carefully in that sense.

3. Who is your target audience?

Are you more of a global brand or company and more people are responding to you in Europe? Or are you based in the US and your audience is mainly here? Where are your competitors based and where is there audience?

As you are answering those questions you’ll be filling in the missing pieces as the best locations to target your audiences. There is another option to show your ads in any location worldwide. Personally, for TrackMaven ad’s I avoid the latter because I want my ads to be very targeted and choosing to show the ads worldwide may give me a larger audience; however, it’s more of a spray and pray method I would like to avoid.

Devices and gender make up the other components of the audience portion. As for gender it’s a little more self explanatory. For devices, if your product only functions on iOS, you should just target these devices or if you are releasing a new Android app you can target to just that audience.

Target by Interest

Although the keyword targeting has become useful in certain cases, the engagement rate for targeting by interest has had a higher value. Targeting by interest is immediately hones in on who your target audience is.

1. “Add @usernames to target people similar to followers of those users.”

Adding in your influencers, companies that have similar customers to you, but are not competitors, your own competitors or your customers’ Twitter handles can all be placed in here.

On the right hand side you’ll the see the estimated reach with the users you are targeting.

Depending on the tweets that I would like to promote, that’s what I will choose to base who I want to target in my audience.

2. Interests

Just as Twitter puts it adding interests categories will help enable you to target a broader audience.

Usually, I leave this category out, unless I’m really trying to test what part of my broader audience (marketing, in this case) will be more likely to engage with a tweet and fill out a lead form.

Promoted Account:

To be honest, I’ve stayed away from promoting the TrackMaven twitter account for two reasons. First, I understand that quantity of followers is important; however, only to a certain extent. If promoting your account is essential in getting your product into the hands of your audience, by all means promote your account! Not to knock on anyone promoting your account, of course! But, promoting your account is essentially buying valuable followers, unlike Facebook though, adding more followers doesn’t increase your targeted audience size or who you can reach. You can already do that without more followers.

Master Twitter Secrets

Event, webinar and conference targeting

This is my favorite secret that I’m sharing, it’s targeting events hashtags, weekly or monthly webinars or conference hashtags. Now think back to the last time you were at a conference. What did you do as the speaker was speaking? Oh, I know what I did, I noted down quotes and I TWEETED THE WHOLE THING. Ok, sorry for yelling, but think about the opportunities you can gain from targeting the specific keywords of a conference and the trends people will want to search for that conference. Think about it there may be over 500 attendees at the conference and will bound to be searching for the conference’s hashtag…boom opportunity for your promoted tweet to be front and center. There is a chance that you may not bid high enough to gain the engagement, but there is value in targeting the things above.

Competitor Targeting

Target your competitor’s, their usernames, keywords, interests. It helps and possibly gives you a competitive advantage if a potential customer is looking for a product your competitor provides when you can provide the same thing.

Emphasis on Editorial Calendar: Promoting tweets requires you to use tweets that you have already tweeted. So if you are planning on sending out a huge campaign at the end of the month, it is essential that you have these tweets alredy scheduled and you can promote them after. I’ve made the mistake of wanting to target tweets that I haven’t sent out yet and I have had to send out a couple that looked at little repetitive at first in order for me to use Twitter Ads.

Know what people are talking about: Although, I really like to avoid marketing jargon, I really can’t help myself in using the term news-jacking or real-time marketing. What’s going on in the world? Did one of your peers release something new or was featured multiple times in the press? What about your competitors? Or what are the trending topics you can take advantage of? Knowing what is going on in the conversation on Twitter goes a long way with interacting on Twitter, but also with Ad Targeting. Even though I am an avid Facebook Ad fan, I feel that Twitter Ads are more reactive and time-sensitive. Yet, if you converse quickly the benefits can come through faster.

Using Twitter’s Ad Analytics To Your Advantage

The analytics on Twitter Ads = mind-blown. Everything is detailed and very granular in a non-noisy and non-overwhelming sense. I could see what usernames I chose to target were more effective, what locations I received the most engagement, and what devices responded better. Everything was displayed in beautiful graphs that I can easily hover over to see the details.

Manual Actions

This secret moves away from Twitter Ads, but involves strategic targeting. Searching for specific keywords in Twitter or your competitors will also display users and tweets relevant to you. If I did a simple search on Twitter about competitive intelligence, I can then easily see what people were tweeting on competitive intelligence and then interact with those tweets in some way. I would suggest searching on of your keywords, favoriting the relevant tweets and maybe following those users. You never know who your influencers can become and although this is a more manual targeting task, it only takes a second to gain a possibility of added benefit.

Even though, I’ve mentioned that I am a huge Facebook Ad Fan, Twitter Ads have left me pleasantly surprised especially with their effective targeting. I’m curious to see how engaging the lead generation cards become; however, until then I’ll stick with some of the secrets mentioned above.

Do you have your own set of target secrets on Twitter Ads? How effective were they for you? Let me know in a comment below, tweet (or target me in an ad) @sabelharris, or give Maven a holler @TrackMavenApp.