Since Twitter first rolled out its Advertising API in February 2014, major structural changes have been made to enable advertisers to more efficiently create and manage their Campaigns. The newest API release is the most flexible yet; offering features not yet available in the native Twitter Ads Manager tool, and AdParlor has taken full advantage.
Historical Challenges
The original Twitter advertising structure consisted of Campaigns, Ad Groups (previously known as Line Item), and Tweets. Only one Ad Group per Campaign was allowed; if you wanted to split or A/B test your target audience, you needed to create a new Campaign per targeting iteration. This restriction resulted in advertisers having to create many different Campaigns, one by one, and then report on and manage each individually, which was extremely time consuming. At the time, AdParlor addressed these issues by providing a bulk Twitter Campaign Creation tool, and allowing for bulk management of bids, budgets, and statuses of Twitter Campaigns to save time and effort.
Twitter also restricted advertising to a single “primary targeting type”. This meant that an advertiser could only target its audiences using one of either “Keywords and Interests”, “Similar Followers”, “TV Shows”, or “Tailored Audiences” – there was no ability to combine these targeting types. Both structural and targeting restrictions have since been relaxed.
Twitter Advertising Today
Twitter’s recent API-only changes now allow advertisers to create multiple Ad Groups within a single Campaign. This is hugely beneficial as it greatly simplifies the split testing process. Now you can simply assign different target audiences to different Ad Groups within a single Campaign, which makes creation faster and management easier. Additionally, you can now combine all targeting types, providing much more flexibility in reaching your desired audiences. Furthermore, Campaigns and Ad Groups both have budgets, making it easy for you to manage an overall Campaign budget, and also to set an appropriate budget for each target audience.
AdParlor has capitalized on these changes with a new bulk Creation Tool and an all-in-one Actionable Reporting tool that enables you to optimize your advertising spends.
Build your Advertising Success with the AdParlor Tools
The new Twitter Campaign structure allows you to more effectively split test your target audience and the creatives used. Split testing is important because it enables you to understand the demographic characteristics of your high quality users and the creatives they respond to, so that you can refine your campaigns to get the best return on your advertising spend. However, the process of proper split testing can be time consuming and cumbersome to create, analyze and optimize without the necessary tools.
Easily create unique targeting segments
The split testing for targeting is done at the Ad Group level. Many different targeting groups should be created as combinations of particular aspects, e.g. gender, geography. These are referred to as “segments”. Bulk creating many segments can be quickly and easily achieved in the new AdParlor Creation Tool, which is designed to reduce manual, repetitive tasks and maximize your workflow efficiency. To illustrate:
- First, save time by importing lists of values for each targeting criterion from the AdParlor Libraries e.g. list of countries.
- Work smart; let the system automatically combine values from each criterion of interest to create unique targeting groups (e.g. males who live in the USA). Furthermore, these complete groups can be saved for re-use in other campaigns so you only have to go through this process once.
- Generate unique Ad Groups from each targeting group and upload these to Twitter. You can specify Ad Group budgets here for more granular control of your spends.
Save creative groups for simple management
We recommend that you customize creatives for each targeting segment to better resonate with the users. With the AdParlor tool, you easily group together creatives that have a common theme (e.g. Canadian flag) re-use these across all Canada-targeted audience segments.
These can be either existing Tweets or Twitter Cards, or you can create new ones as necessary from the in-built interface. Tweets can be created as Standard Tweets, which are delivered organically to all followers of the user’s handle, or they can be created as Promoted Only Tweets, which are not delivered organically.
Twitter Cards are designed to drive direct responses from users, whether it be a link to a website or a prompt to download an app. For more information on Twitter Cards, see http://admocks.devadparlor.wpengine.com/guide-to-twitter-cards/. These can also be created within the AdParlor interface so you can easily manage all of your creative pieces in one place.
Group related creative pieces together by simply selecting the desired Tweets and Twitter Cards to promote, and saving each as a separate Creative Group. As with the targeting groups, these can also be re-used across multiple campaigns in the future to save you time.
The final step of the creation tool allows you to simply mix and match each Ad Group with the appropriate Creative Groups. Simply hit ‘Create’ and you’ve quickly launched a variety of powerful split targeting tests matched with the most appropriate creatives.
Analyze Campaign Performance and Optimize
The AdParlor all-in-one reporting and management tool, aptly named “Actionable Reporting”, makes optimization simple and painless.
Choose from predefined reporting templates to effortlessly compare performance between common targeting differentiators (e.g. gender) across all of your Ad Groups for each Campaign. You can also choose your own grouping criteria, pick your metrics, and filter your results to generate a fully customized report that best suits your needs.
Then, instantly apply your findings to all relevant Ad Groups from the same screen. This approach to optimization helps reduce user error, removes unnecessary repetition from your optimization workflow and saves you time. The new Twitter structure also means you can now allocate different proportions of your overall Campaign budget to better performing Ad Groups to further improve your spend efficiency.
To quickly summarize
AdParlor’s revamped Twitter capabilities provide many benefits to advertisers:
- Time savings with re-usable targeting and creative groups
- Split testing your targeting with a simple click
- Advanced budget management via both Campaign and Ad Group level budgets
- Sophisticated Actionable Reporting
Remember, Twitter’s native tools currently do not support Multiple Ad Groups per Campaign, and they don’t appear to be coming anytime soon.
Get Started with AdParlor
Want to know more or get an account setup? Contact our support team at support@adparlor.com.