Twitter introduces keyword-targeting for advertisers

Twitter will leave no stone unturned to woo advertisers. Turning tweet content into a “first-class citizen” of its advertising arsenal, Twitter has introduced keyword targeting for advertising on the micro-blogging website. Essentially, Twitter’s ad partners will now be able to target their ads based on the content of your tweets.

The new feature is now available to advertisers and will enable them to reach users based on the keywords in their recent Tweets and the Tweets with which users recently engaged. Nipoon Malhotra, Product Manager, Revenue for Twitter wrote in a blog post, that this capability is an important one because it lets marketers reach users at the right moment, in the right context.

How the targeting will work is very simple. Say you tweet about a clothing brand that you love, the brand could run a geotargeted campaign in your area using the name itself as a keyword. You will be able to see a promoted tweet about the brand’s latest offers and sales. It’s a win-win situation for parties involved. You will be able to see advertisements relevant to your interests, and advertisers will be able to optimise their resources by showing the ads to only those who are interested.

Advertising made easy

Malhotra assured users in the blog post that this new feature will make absolutely no difference to user experience on the micro-blogging website. The amount of ads displayed are not going to increase and users will still be able to dismiss irrelevant Promoted Tweets.

"In fact, we believe users' experiences with ads will improve as a result of this feature as they see more relevant Promoted Tweets," Malhotra says. He mentions that when Twitter was testing this feature out, it noted that users were more likely to engage with keyword targeted ads than other forms of timeline targeting.

Malhotra gave the example of GoPro, the makers of action-oriented HD cameras who were running keyword-targeted ads on Twitter. GoPro got about two million ad impressions and an engagement rate of a cool 11 percent.

It figures that Twitter would want to go out of its way to ensure that advertisers get their moneys’ worth on the site considering the staggering ad rate it currently charges. While Twitter says that advertisers can pay as much or as little as they want for Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends will set companies back by a cool $200,000.

What is more important is that advertisers will now be able to make optimum use of Twitter’s new Cards to promote or sell their products and services. Say, a movie theatre is running a series of advertisements through Promoted Tweets, users will be able to make purchases of movie tickets right from within the tweet now.

Twitter introduced new Cards earlier this month that is set to improve user experience on the micro-blogging website. Twitter Cards are essentially embedded information that pop up within a tweet. When you click on a tweet of this sort, it opens up a drawer that contains such content. The company added App, Product and Gallery cards this month.

With the App Card, you will be able to see more information about an app including its name, icon, description and other details like rating or price. Using the Product Cards, developers will now be able to pull additional information from websites for products. Besides image and description of the product, Twitter will allow for two customisable fields that can display additional information like price or ratings. Lastly, instead of just a single image, users will now be able to embed an album or collection of photographs via a preview of the photo gallery. It will indicate to a viewer that an entire gallery, and not just a single image has been shared.

Advertisers now have a vast variety of options to choose from while displaying something as simple as a Promoted Tweet on Twitter.