Twitter Advertising Unveiled A New Ad Unit – Website Cards

Twitter has been stepping it up with a whole new look to their profiles, TV targeting, and native advertising. In addition to these exciting new features, Twitter promised advertisers that it would be rolling out new types of ads this year and they’ve released one new type of ad unit that promises to drive more traffic to your website. Website Cards highlight a small photo, a line of text, and a URL to an advertiser’s website. It works pretty much like a Lead Generation card, except that instead of the user filling out a form on the post, they would click on a direct link to your website.

The new type of ad will be released to the world beginning Friday on both mobile and desktop. You’ll find them on your ad dashboard under Creatives > Cards > Website. While we believe this isn’t much different from putting tweeting out your Website URL and calling it a day, Twitter claims that the Website Card generated better engagement at a lower CPC (cost-per-click).

Twitter Advertising, Yay or Nay?

On a side note, should advertisers and businesses invest in Twitter Advertising? Is it worth it?

Many businesses like to use Twitter specifically for driving sales, leads, and website traffic. And over the last year, Twitter has been working hard to improve their advertising platform to help marketers achieve specific goals. Tailored Audiences was released back in December, giving advertisers the ability to define specific groups of customers. Additionally, released just a few weeks ago, Twitter released keyword targeting, a feature that enables advertisers to reach users based on keywords found in Tweets or certain keywords found in the most engaged Tweets. And now with new Website Cards, advertisers have the ability to surface content found on their website such as a product page, home page, or blog post.

Twitter Ad Options

There are three types of promotion you can do on Twitter.

Promoted Tweets

You can target an audience based on location, interests, and gender. This is great for businesses that want to target people outside of their existing followers.

Promoted Trends

Trends are popular topics users are tweeting out. These change several times a day and can be seen on the left-hand side of any Twitter homepage. Promoted Trends is a way of newsjacking and placing your business’s tweets relative to a particular trending topic.

Promoted Accounts

To win more target specific followers, you can take advantage of Promoted Accounts. Twitter will place your account under a suggested category of the “Who to Follow” and “People Searches.”

The only disadvantage that many advertisers will discover about Twitter ads is that they can get expensive. It’s important for your business to set an amount willing to be spent on each follow/interaction. While Twitter’s advertising is six times more expensive than Facebook advertising ($.54 vs $3.54), you’ll see much more engagement (1-3% vs 0.119%).

If you’re new to Twitter Advertising, some recommendations we like to share are:

1. Start with a low bid – see what works for your business and start off with a low bid to prevent overpaying for something you aren’t sure you’re wanting to get from the advertising platform.

2. Test times – Peak times for Twitter usually fall in later in the day (6-8pm), but be sure to run your campaigns to see what works best.

3. Promote accounts and tweets at the same time – the best way to move the needle on Twitter advertising is to promote your Twitter in addition to promoted tweets. This allows your brand to be recognized and shows that you’re active providing content for engagement on your account. Additionally, by running both types of ads, you’ll be compare results between the two with Twitter’s ad tools to give you a direction to focus on with your advertising.