We are charging into the new year and officially have one month under our belt! With the new year comes new changes to advertising platforms, and Twitter is no different.
On January 24th, Twitter announced its rollout of Search Keywords advertising. Today we are going to go over what has led up to this announcement, what this new ad type looks like, and what these changes might mean for advertisers and Twitter alike.
TWITTER’S LOSS OF ADVERTISERS
After a months-long battle of will-he-won’t-he, Elon Musk officially acquired Twitter on October 27th, 2022.
According to Forbes, the November after Musk purchased Twitter, their ad spend was down 46% compared to the previous November. And based on Media Matters For America reports, 50 out of the top 100 advertisers pulled their Twitter advertising all together.
Though Twitter was experiencing a slow decrease in advertising spend in the months leading up to Musks acquisition, November saw its biggest plunge. September down 5%, October down 12% and November down 46% year over year. Many people point to Musk’s handling of the account verification controversies and spreading of false information on the platform as reasons why many companies may have pulled their spend for Twitter.
TWITTER’S NEW AD TYPE
With the loss in ad spend over the past few months, it is safe to assume that Musk and his team are searching for ways to bring advertisers back to their platform.
Their solution: introduce Search Keyword advertising
In the past, Twitter has offered a number of ad types including promoted tweets that show in users’ timelines based on if Twitter thinks it is relevant to that user, or follower ads, which target users who already follow the company. However, none of these ad types have allowed businesses to have control over who they think is relevant based on keywords.
Twitter’s rollout of search keyword advertising is a new opportunity for businesses looking to expand their targeted reach on the platform. It allows businesses to target relevant users based on search terms, so they are only reaching out to potential customers with an interest in their product or services.
Advertisers will be able to add keywords that they find relevant to their business or exclude keywords that they want to avoid. Twitter will then serve these ads based on keywords in users’ search queries, recent Tweets, and Tweets they have engaged with.
Twitter ads that use keywords can appear in three places: users’ home timelines, tweet detail pages, and search results and profiles.
Advertisers have the choice to use a few highly specific keywords or many general keywords. Deciding which approach to use is based on your goals. If you are looking to have a high engagement rate, using highly specific keywords is the best approach. On the other hand, if your goal is to reach more people and have a higher search volume, adding many general keywords is the direction to go.
This new type of targeted marketing approach can significantly increase campaign engagement and optimize the Return on Investment (ROI).
WHERE WILL THESE TWITTER CHANGES TAKE US
Historically Twitter has never been the most popular advertising platform. In fact, according to Instapage, only about 46% of advertisers were using the platform back in 2022 compared to 87% of advertisers that were on Facebook. Will the changes to twitter’s advertising platform have an effect on these numbers?
It will be interesting to see how well these keyword ads perform and if they have a higher ROI, engagement rate, and conversion rate than Twitter ads have historically had. Now that there is more control over who is seeing their ads, will these changes convince advertisers to come back to the platform or even begin advertising on Twitter altogether?