Twitter Ads Objectives – Which One Is Right For Your Campaign?

Twitter ads can be an invaluable tool for digital marketers looking to tackle high-priority business objectives.

The platform allows brands to target users with data-driven tactics, boost brand awareness at scale, and drive cost-efficient conversions with smart Twitter ads. 

One of the most important aspects of Twitter advertising is objective selection.

Choosing the right objective for your Twitter ads campaigns is absolutely crucial – working towards the correct goal will help you to optimise your ads and dramatically improve ROI. 

Let’s take a closer look at the different campaign objectives available on Twitter, and explain how you can ensure that your Twitter ads are working as hard as possible for your brand. 

As a specialist Twitter ads agency we can help you with your campaigns just get in touch for a free consultation.

What are Twitter ads?

Twitter is a social media platform that places a strong emphasis on conversations, interactions, and real-time communications between users.

The majority of activity on the Twitter platform revolves around active conversations and trending topics, often involving thousands of different users, brands, and publishers. 

Unsurprisingly, the Twitter feed is specifically designed to facilitate quick and easy interactions between users. 

Twitter audiences can use replies, quotes, and Retweets to interact with each other, while also exploring mountains of new content on the Twitter homepage. 

Twitter ads work in exactly the same way for advertisers. 

Twitter ads are delivered in and around the main feed and can be targeted towards specific audience segments. The platform offers a range of data-driven targeting options that enable brands to reach high-value users and potential customers. 

You can also utilise several different Twitter ad formats throughout your campaigns. Each unique ad type and placement can help you to achieve different business objectives. 

Which audiences can I target on Twitter?

There are three primary types of audience targeting available on the Twitter platform. 

1. Demographic Targeting

If you’ve ever run paid advertising on other social media platforms, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with Demographic targeting. 

Demographic targeting allows you to reach users based on their location, language, device, age, and gender. 

These targeting options aren’t overly complex, but they can be useful for narrowing down a wider Twitter audience to reach more relevant individuals. It can also be helpful to kick off a campaign with a broader demographic audience to collect valuable insights and learnings. 

2. Audience Targeting

Twitter offers several Audience Targeting options that allow you to serve more contextually relevant and data-driven ads on the platform.

There are several different types of Audience Targeting tactics, including: 

Conversation Targeting – allows advertisers to target users based on the content of their Twitter conversations, using data from across 25+ categories and 10,000+ topics.

Keyword Targeting – allows advertisers to target (or exclude) users based on specific keywords that they’ve Tweeted, searched for, or engaged with.

Interest Targeting – allows advertisers to target users based on their interests and engagements with 350+ pre-defined topics across 25 categories.

Audience Targeting can be super effective on Twitter, helping brands reach granular audiences who are more likely to click and convert. 

By increasing the relevancy of your Twitter ads (with tactics like Keyword targeting) you can rapidly improve your conversion rates and ad spend efficiency. 

3. Your Audiences (Custom Audience) 

Twitter also enables brands to utilise more advanced data-led audiences, known as Your Audiences. 

This includes Follower Targeting, which can be a fantastic way for advertisers to drive action from existing followers who have already expressed an interest in their brand. 

Marketers can also create powerful Custom Audiences, which are built from data sources like customer lists and pixel segments. 

There are several different types of Custom Audiences available on Twitter, including: 

• Lists – target existing customers by uploading their email addresses to the Twitter platform and matching them with the Twitter user base. 
• Website Activity – target recent website visitors by collecting Twitter user data from a Twitter pixel. 
• App Activity – target users who have taken specific actions on your app by collecting data through mobile app conversion tracking.  

Custom Audiences can drive insanely efficient results through Twitter ads, as they allow advertisers to reach red-hot prospects who are significantly more likely to convert. 

The benefits of Twitter marketing

Twitter ad campaigns can generate outstanding results for digital marketers, helping both small businesses and established brands achieve their core objectives.  

Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits associated with Twitter advertising. 

Twitter is a unique social media platform

Twitter offers advertisers a number of special features that differentiate the platform from other social media websites. 

For example, rather than placing a strong emphasis on bold visual content that clutters feeds, Twitter focuses on delivering a more streamlined user experience. 

The platform is built to encourage conversations and direct interactions between users, and ad placements are designed to be non-intrusive and highly engaging. 

Brands have a few options when it comes to engaging Twitter users, including Tweet replies, Promoted Tweets, and Twitter polls. This enables marketers to easily connect with target audiences at scale, nurture their social media following, and strengthen their brand identity on Twitter.

If you’re looking to grow long-term customer loyalty and interact more directly with your target audience, Twitter is the place to be.  

Advertisers can drive enormous campaign reach

Twitter ads can reach a huge audience on the platform, which means that you can easily drive high volumes of conversions and effectively scale up your ad spend. 

Twitter boasts around 237.8 million monetizable daily active users, providing brands with a significant number of valuable prospects to reach, engage, and convert. 

Plus, although Twitter can’t compete with social media giants like Facebook when it comes to sheer scale, the network compensates by offering audiences who are super engaged and active on the platform.

Twitter users are comfortable with Tweeting and replying to different accounts, meaning you can drive sky-high levels of Tweet engagements with the right brand message.

Twitter ads are designed to be cost-efficient 

Running a Twitter ads campaign can also be incredibly cost-efficient, thanks to the platform’s buying model. 

Twitter ads are objective-based, which means that advertisers will only pay for successful outcomes (e.g. website traffic, engagement, followers) that contribute towards their campaign objectives. 

This is particularly useful for smaller businesses and newer advertisers who need to ensure that their ad spend isn’t being wasted. Since you’ll only be paying for pre-defined actions, you just need to make sure that you’re selecting the right ad objective. 

As long as you focus on the correct goals and stay diligent with your Twitter ads optimisations, you can run an extremely effective ad campaign on the platform. 

The different Twitter ads objectives

Selecting the right ad objective is a key component of running a successful Twitter advertising campaign. 

Objectives on Twitter are broken down into three main categories – Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. 

The right option for your brand all depends on the actions that you’d like your target audience to take and the area of the marketing funnel that you’re addressing. 

Let’s run through the different campaign objectives that are available on the platform, and explain how each goal can contribute to your business. 

Awareness

Reach

The Reach objective is all about maximising the reach of your Twitter ad campaign. This is ideal for building brand awareness, showcasing your product offering, and gaining maximum exposure for your campaign message. 

If you’re a relatively new advertiser on Twitter, or if you’re launching a new product, the Reach objective is great for quickly increasing relevance and awareness. 

Available bidding strategies: CPM (Automatic Cost Bidding is recommended) 

Consideration

Video Views

If you have a strong video asset to utilise across your Twitter ads, the Video Views objective is perfect for fuelling success.

This objective will help you to drive brand awareness through high-quality and efficient video views. If you’re looking to put your video ads in front of the prospects who are most likely to view them, then Video Views is the right goal for your campaign. 

Available bidding strategies:

15s view bid type – longer views and higher completion rates.

2s/50% bid type – maximise campaign reach at a lower cost.

6s/50% bid type – pay a premium for longer video views.

3s/100% bid type – ensure complete viewability of your video.

Pre Roll Views

The Twitter Amplify ad format allows you to run snappy video ads in the pre-roll position, alongside premium video content from trusted publishers. 

The Pre Roll Views objective can be highly effective for advertisers because you’re reaching users in a content-consumption mindset and appearing around videos they’re interested in. 

If you want to deliver punchy video ads and maximise the reach of your campaign, then the Pre Roll Views objective can be a solid option. 

Available bidding strategies:

2s/50% bid type – maximise reach at a lower cost.

3s/100% bid type – ensure full viewability of your video.

6s/50% bid type – pay a premium for longer video views.

15s view bid type – run on a CPM for maximum completion rates.

App Installs

Looking to increase the visibility of your app to generate cost-efficient downloads and user engagement?

The App Installs objective is designed for this specific goal. If you’re looking to reach a mobile-first audience and drive users directly from the Twitter platform to the app store, this is the ideal option for your campaign. 

Available bidding strategies:

App Purchase Optimization – optimise towards in-app purchases and pay for impressions.

App Clicks – bid on and pay for app clicks.

App Installs (Recommended) – bid on app installs and pay for impressions/app clicks.

Website Traffic

The Website Traffic objective is all about maximising the number of high-quality users that click on your Twitter ads and visit your landing pages.

This is a highly versatile objective and can be used to drive potential customers to specific product pages or encourage users to learn more about your products.

If you’re going to select the Website Traffic objective, it’s also key that you have proper conversion tracking in place through the Twitter pixel. 

This will allow for more accurate measurement, meaning you can understand more about the types of users that are landing on your website and the actions they’re taking. 

Available bidding strategies: Twitter recommends experimenting with different automated bidding strategies to understand which drives optimal performance. 

Engagement

Twitter is designed for content exploration and mass user interactions. 

With the Engagement objective, you can increase the number of Twitter users that view and engage with your Tweets and videos. 

This objective is highly flexible and can be used to achieve various business goals. For example, you can increase engagement to boost brand and product awareness, connect directly with potential customers, and strengthen your brand presence on Twitter. 

Available bidding strategies: CPE (Cost Per Engagement) – Twitter recommends using auto-bidding for maximum reach and efficiency. 

Followers

Building a loyal and active follower base is extremely important on Twitter, particularly if you’ll be using organic Tweets to connect with your audience on the platform. 

By using the Followers objective, you can promote your Twitter account to attract new followers and steadily build a larger audience to communicate with. 

Since every new Twitter follower represents a potential customer, nurturing your follower base is hugely important. With the right brand messaging and organic strategy, you can transform new followers into brand advocates and high-value buyers. 

Available bidding strategies: CPF (Cost Per Follow) – Twitter recommends setting a target bid to maximise new followers while also controlling bidding costs. 

Conversion

App Re-engagements 

For businesses looking to encourage action from their app users, the App Re-engagements objective is a smart choice.

Marketers can use this objective to drive opens, updates, or specific actions within their app. 

The App Re-engagements objective is also particularly useful if you’re looking to bring back infrequent or inactive users. You can use Twitter ads to remind audiences about your app and nudge them into action with incentives, promotions, and rewards. 

For businesses that rely heavily on their app for transactions or sales, the App Re-engagements objective can be extremely useful. 

Available bidding strategies: bid on and pay for app clicks – Twitter recommends setting a target cost to drive high volumes of app clicks at a controlled price.

Keen to learn more about a specific Twitter campaign objective? Check out this page for more information on the different Twitter goals. 

Achieving optimal results with Twitter ads 

Now that we’ve outlined each campaign objective available on the Twitter platform, it’s time to explain how you can launch high-performing ads to achieve them. 

By following some of the best practices, you’ll be able to run a Twitter ads campaign that delivers against your key goals and skyrockets your brand growth. 

Keep your ads snappy and scannable 

The majority of your Twitter audience will be racing through their home feed at a high speed, consuming bite-sized text posts and short videos. 

This means you need to grab attention with your Twitter advertising – and fast. 

Large blocks of ad text and long-form videos aren’t likely to keep users interested, so make sure that your Twitter ads are short and sweet. 

Use your Twitter ad copy to focus on your most persuasive product benefits, and get to the point as quickly as possible. If you’re using Twitter video ads, try to aim for 15 seconds or less to maximise engagement. 

Create Twitter ads that feel native to the platform

Although you’re running paid Twitter advertising, that doesn’t mean your creative assets should stand out like a sore thumb.

If your Twitter ads feel native and authentic to your audience, they’re infinitely more likely to drive clicks and conversions. 

To create ads that feel natural, take a look at popular posts on the Twitter platform for inspiration. Many posts use emojis and hashtags for visibility, so don’t shy away from incorporating these into your own Twitter assets. 

You should also try to maintain a conversational tone when responding to Twitter audiences. 

While there’s nothing wrong with staying professional, if your brand voice feels more accessible and friendly, users are more likely to engage with your Tweets and ads. 

Balance paid ads with organic posts

Paid ads are a fantastic way to extend your reach and generate conversions on Twitter – but it’s important not to overlook the role that organic content can play. 

If paid Twitter advertising helps your brand to attract new followers and customers, then organic marketing can help your brand to retain them in the long term. 

Try to keep your Twitter profile active with regular posts and engaging Tweets. Vary the types of organic content that you’re posting (e.g. business updates, educational videos) to keep users engaged over time. 

Organic posts can even help to inform and refine your Twitter advertising. 

If you notice that certain themes or messages are driving high levels of organic engagement, you can amplify this content with paid advertising to scale up the results. 

It can be tricky for new advertisers to know where to start with Twitter ads – working alongside expert Twitter marketers can make a huge difference to small businesses. 

A specialist marketing agency can help brands to select smart objectives, target the right audience, and make data-driven optimisations that maximise performance. 

Getting started with a Twitter ad campaign

Ready to launch your own high-performing Twitter ad campaign?

Let’s run through the steps required to set up a Twitter ads account and launch a new Twitter advertising campaign. 

First things first, you’ll need to sign up for a new Twitter ads account. 

This will grant you access to the Twitter Ads Manager, where you can set up Promoted Tweets, monitor campaign performance, and make ad optimisations. 

Check out this guide for more info on account creation. You’ll need to enter some basic personal details and confirm your billing information to get started. 

Once your Twitter ads account is ready to go, you’ll be able to create your first ad group and set up a new campaign. There are a few different components that you’ll need to set up before launching your Twitter ads, including:  

• Campaign type
• Ad formats 
• Target audience 
• Ad objectives
• Campaign budget 
• Ad schedule 

Useful resources for Twitter advertising 

Interested in learning more about advertising on Twitter?

We’ve got you covered. Below are some handy Twitter marketing resources that will help you to successfully launch your first campaign and smash your business objectives. 

How Much Do Twitter Ads Cost?

Twitter ads can help digital marketers to reach their target audience, drive cost-efficient conversions, and bolster their social media presence. 

The key is to select a campaign objective that aligns with your core business goals.

If you launch a new Twitter campaign with a smart objective and commit to frequent ad optimisations, you’ll be ready to knock your marketing goals out of the park.