How to Create a Twitter Ad Campaign

Whether you’re looking to increase conversions, app installations or simply just want to increase brand awareness and reach a wider audience, Twitter is a fantastic platform that offers businesses, like yours, the opportunity to create targeted and impactful ad campaigns. In fact, studies from Content Marketing Institute shows that a whopping 82% of business to business companies are using Twitter to share their latest content and promote their products and services. 

However, effectively navigating Twitter ads requires a clear understanding of the platform's features, which is why we've created this comprehensive step-by-step guide to ensure creating your Twitter ad campaign goes as smoothly as possible.

Here’s our 5 step guide to creating a Twitter ad campaign:

1. Consider your ad goals & budget
2. Identify your target audience
3. Create engaging ad content
4. Set up your ad in Twitter Ad Management
5. Measure results 

1.Consider Your Ad Goals & Budget

First and foremost, before doing anything, you want to really think about what you want to get out of your ad campaign and what goals you expect to achieve. Some common goals include boosting brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or increasing app installations. The campaign objective you choose will determine which engagement types and actions you’ll pay for.

Twitter Ad Campaign Pricing 

You also need to consider your budget and how much money you’re happy to spend on your ad campaign. Twitter offers a number of different pricing models, including cost per engagement (CPE), cost per click (CPC), and cost per impression (CPM). 

• Cost Per Engagement (CPE): This pricing strategy only requires you to pay when users engage with your ad, such as likes, retweets, replies, follows, or clicks on your ad. This pricing model is most suitable if your main goal is to increase engagement and interaction with your content.
  
  
• Cost per Click (CPC): CPC is a pay-per-click pricing strategy whereby you pay for each individual click on your ad. CPC is a good choice if your primary goal is to drive traffic to your website or landing page.
  
  
• Cost per Impression (CPI): This pricing model charges you per thousand impressions of your ad, and is an excellent choice if you want to increase visibility and reach as many users as possible.
  
  
• Cost per Video View (CPV): If you're running video ads on Twitter, CPV pricing allows you to pay based on the number of video views your ad receives. A view is typically counted when a user watches your video for a specific duration, such as 2 seconds or more.
  
  
• Maximum Bid: With a maximum bid strategy, you set the maximum amount you're willing to pay for each desired action (engagement, click, impression, etc.). Twitter will optimise your campaign to achieve the highest number of actions within your specified budget.

• Target Bid: With a target bid strategy, you set a target cost per desired action (engagement, click, impression, etc.), and Twitter optimises your campaign to achieve the desired cost per action. This model allows you to maintain control over your ad spend while aiming for specific results.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

The next step is to identify your target audience. In other words, determine who you want to reach with your ads. Define your target audience by looking at a number of different factors such as interests, demographics, location, behaviours and keywords related to your product or service. 

You can also identify your target audience by looking at your current customer base and identifying common characteristics among them. Understand their interests, behaviours, and preferences related to your product or service, and this analysis should provide a solid foundation for defining your target audience.

You can also use helpful tools like surveys or focus groups to gather insights about your potential target customers. Use this gathered information to understand their pain points, needs, and requests, as well as their preferred communication channels and their online behaviour.

3. Create Engaging Ad Content

Now the fun part! Once you have identified your ad objectives & target audience, it’s time to create engaging and compelling content for your campaign.

Here are some of our top tips for creating engaging ad content on Twitter:

• Use scroll-stopping visuals: Include eye-catching images, videos, or GIFs in your ads to capture the attention of users as they scroll through their timeline. Ensure these visuals are properly formatted for optimal display on Twitter. Here are some additional tips for creating engaging video ads. 

• Keep messaging concise: Twitter's character limit requires you to be concise and to the point, so ensure your headline or message is compelling and quickly communicates your message effectively. Make sure you include a clear call-to-action (CTA) in your ad copy to nudge users to take action.

• Spark emotion or curiosity: The most engaging content often evokes emotion or curiosity around your brand. Consider using storytelling techniques, posing thought-provoking questions, or using comedy to grab users attention and create a greater connection with your audience.

• Include social proof: Use things like customer testimonials or user-generated content, in your ads, as these positive endorsements can build trust and credibility among your target audience, encouraging engagement and interest. Learn more about user-generated content here. 

If you don’t feel up to creating your own high-quality ads or you simply haven’t got the time, our expert creative team at Aura Ads would love to help! We are well-versed in creating scroll-stopping ads on social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. 

4. Set Up Your Ad in Twitter Ad Management

Once you have everything in place and ready to go, you can set up your ad in Twitter Ad Management. Start by signing into your Twitter Ads Manager account and click ‘create campaign’ to begin the process of setting up your campaign. Here it will prompt you to specify the campaign details we touched on at the beginning, such as your ad objectives, budget and target audience.

You will also need to specify your desired ad format which will help you reach your target audience, including promoted tweets, in-stream video ads and promoted accounts. To help you decide which type of ad is best for your campaign, here’s a description of each type:

• Promoted Tweets: Promoted Tweets are normal tweets that businesses pay to promote to a larger audience. They appear in users' Twitter timelines, search results, and profile pages and can include text, images, videos, or GIFs.
  
  
• In-Stream Video Ads: Video ads are skippable ads that appear before, during, or after video content from Twitter's Amplify partners. Video ads offer businesses the opportunity to deliver targeted video content to a relevant audience. At Aura Ads, our creative strategists build scroll-stopping video ads, built to convert on Twitter.

• Promoted Accounts: Promoted Accounts are specifically designed to increase the visibility and followers of a Twitter account. These ads appear in users' timelines, search results, and "Who to Follow" recommendations. 

5. Measure Results 

Once your ad campaign has finished running, it’s essential that you analyse the performance data to evaluate its success. By measuring the results, you can assess how effective it's been in achieving your initial ad goals. 

Take a look at key performance indicators such as engagement, return on investment, impressions or click-through rates and determine whether certain elements of your campaign needs improvement or potentially more investment. 

Measuring and analysing ad campaign results also aids you in understanding the cost efficiency of your advertising efforts. You can identify which ads or targeting options generated the highest return on investment and allocate your budget more effectively in future campaigns. 

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With up to 70% of campaign performance rooted in eCommerce ad creative, we believe in the power of a creative-led growth strategy for all of your digital channels. So, if you’re interested in bettering your Twitter ad creative, or any other social ad creative such as Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube or Facebook, get in touch with a member of our team today to see how we can help. 

For more tips and tricks from our experts, head over to our social media marketing blog.

Written by Kate Jones for Aura Ads.