Imagine for a second that you are Twitter. You’ve basically put all of your eggs in one basket, relying almost exclusively on advertising. Sure, user growth is slowing, but as long as you can still get advertisers to pay top-dollar to reach the users you do have, then you’re good as gold.
Then you miss badly on your quarterly earnings report, seeing revenue that is $20 million less than expected. Not only that, but you also see slower than expected growth in advertising sales and see ad revenue per user decelerated for four consecutive quarters.
In other words, this is really not a good situation. So what do you do to get advertisers to stay? Give them metrics. Lots and lots of metrics.
Twitter announced new “audience insights” for advertisers on Wednesday, which it says is “a new tool to help advertisers better understand key audiences on Twitter.”
That means going deeper into existing followers, as well as finding new audiences for future campaigns. The audience insights dashboard provides “aggregate information about user demographics, interests, purchasing behavior and more.”
Twitter points out a few different ways that advertisers can take advantage of this new tool. For example, they can see what their followers have purchased (which it can know through its Partner Audiences tool released in March), what they like and even what they watch. The advertiser then takes this information and can figure out how best to reach that person, including which video clips they will most likely respond to.
“You can also use audience insights to learn more about your followers and the people who engage with your Tweets, and then tailor your targeting and content accordingly,” Twitter wrote. “For instance, if you’re an app developer and see that the majority of your followers use an iPhone, you can make sure your rich media is tailored for that device.”
It can also be used to compare audiences, including a sample against the entire Twitter ecosystem.
The new tools is now available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users, and can be accessed within the U.S., The company plans to roll this out more broadly over the next few months.
Twitter advertising
In the first quarter of this year, once again, almost all of Twitter’s revenue came from advertising, which accounted for $388 million of its total $436 million, an increase of 72% year-to-year. Mobile advertising revenue was 89% of total advertising revenue.
Given those kinds of numbers, its almost a given that Twitter would continuously try to lure advertisers to the platform.
That has included introducing targeted cookie-based ads, which allow advertisers to run ads-based on the sites a user had visited. That “tailored audiences’ product was also expanded to include e-mail and user IDs to target more users.
In March it unveiled Partner Audiences, which basically allows Twitter to follow users around the Web and then show them relevant ads based on that activity, or “intent.”
(Image source: blog.twitter.com)
