Twitter Advertising – What $100 (might) Get You

Twitter recently rolled out what they term advertising ‘cards‘ to a broader audience and so in the name of advertising and lead generation, I decided to give it a try out.

From what I have learned so far, the cards are setup like an in feed advertisement with image + headline and call to action – kinda like any post. But what caught my attention was that through users ‘engaging’ with these cards, you can generate leads, glorious leads. You can setup campaigns in the Twitter Ads portal and target these cards in a multitude of ways, set your spend and how much your willing to pay per ‘engagement’. I’ll preempt this post with the fact that I’m still trying to figure our just what really qualifies as an engagement.

In any case here is what my call-to-action looked like. I chose to not have this show up in my profile, but that is an optional setting if you did want to include. I thought including in my own profile might skew results – I am mainly interested in testing Twitter targeting outside my own followers.

We recently rolled out a new 3D CAD Model portal courtesy PARTsolutions on Design World and used this as call to action. I’ll admit the call is not ultra compelling, no winning iPads or trips to Mars, but it is very important for design engineers and others to be able to get supplier certified 3D CAD models in a variety of formats for their own designs or just get CAD models for general or marketing use.

Campaign Setup

With the design set, I set the total spend on this campaign to $100 bucks and a maximum bid of $1.50 per engagement, and $15 a day max. I set to target via keyword and chose a limited amount of terms. You can use #hashtags too – that seems obvious, so by keyword Twitter is targeting in profile and the term mentioned in tweets.

As Twitter explains, ‘Keyword targeting allows you to reach Twitter users based on keywords in their search queries, recent Tweets, and Tweets they recently engaged with…”

The hashtag #3d cast the widest net with Twitter indicating 10K–100K : Recent global daily volume of Tweets containing said keyword. This type of information is always interesting and I’d say its worth setting up an ad account just for intel if your active at all on Twitter. I could have greatly expanded the keywords to cover other major CAD packages and markets, but again this was a preliminary test.

No offense to our female audience, but I targeted male only as an option as the day prior I saw a Google analytics report showing around 85% + male audience on some select Design World engineering site segments. I also set to US only and any platform except Blackberry (I guess they are still in business, but passed on targeting here).

For the Tweet itself to go with this Card – I used only one iteration – “Supplier Certified 3D CAD models available for download in virtually any native CAD format”cards.twitter.com/cards/a3de5/cqw 

The URL to the card is included & if anyone clicks on the View & Download Now button, that information is shared with me as a lead (Twitter Handle, Name, Email) and the user then sees the next image to proceed to the site with the Thank You message.

This example is pretty basic to just send someone along to an open URL, but I can imagine much better uses like whitepapers, rewards, discount offers, being entered to win, etc. to better drive lead generation.

Results

From May 7 to May 14 Twitter gladly consumed my meager $15 a day and the creative logged just over 10,800 total impressions and 671 engagements. Twitter sent me daily emails suggesting I ramp up keywords & spend and other advice which I did not heed, but Twitter did mention that my card was performing in 90 percentile of all ads – I guess thats good  – 6.21% avg. engagement rate during selected time range.

I was eager to download my csv file for leads and it turns out there was around 10 people who decided this call to action was really good enough to share their email with me. I *thought* that perhaps an engagement would be a lead, but it turns out not to be the case. But Twitter did do as promised, and however you cut it, for $100 bucks I got over 10K impressions, some engagement and 10 leads. As with all leads, a company spending in earnest here would have name, twitter handle and email to load into their CRM / marketing automation platform and continue to nurture those leads.

Twitter also indicated my eCPE (Earned Cost Per Engagement) was $0.15: that x 617 comes out to about the $100. So again by engagement, Twitter says “For the purpose of Twitter’s tracked analytics, earned media is additional free impressions, clicks, and engagements that result from retweets and replies.” The viral effect then is measured as engagements and this free earned media can then fall outside of your original targeting since a retweet from another country or demographic can occur,

Honestly I think the cost per lead on this front was a bit high, but again to get a Twitter Lead from an open URL, its fine. If those folks ultimately fully registered to the 3D CAD portal with the same email, it would then be easy to quantify the initial cost per acquisition using Twitter advertising as source.

For now Twitter is making some good strides in advertising options, and card lead gen might be a good fit for your marketing efforts if your willing to spend more than $100.