Are you a social media sceptic? Do you not buy into the whole philosophy of marketing products and services on platforms like Facebook and Twitter?
Perhaps you’ve yet to be convinced about social media’s value and ROI? Well, if you fit into any of these categories then you’re not alone. Many businesses may appreciate the importance and relevance of social media marketing, but are reluctant to buy into it wholeheartedly because they fail to see how they can accurately measure its value. Well, Twitter has taken up the cudgel and come up with a new conversion tracking service that just might persuade these reluctant advertisers to nail their colours to the social media mast. Twitter is about to give marketers the power to analyse whether their tweets are leading to online purchases.
On Wednesday the network today announced that it was making conversion tracking available to all advertisers.
Twitter maintains that the conversion tracking tool will help advertisers better understand the impact of impressions and user engagement. Is this purely an act of generosity or is there some sort of hidden catch? Well, it’s a bit of both really. It could prove to be a very useful measurement tool for advertisers, but primarily it will only relate to Promoted Tweets: a Promoted Tweet is an advertising practice that enables marketers to pay to increase the prominence of a post.
So how will it work? Well, let’s say your business sells jewellery: if you want to know how many watches or bracelets are sold as a direct result of a promoted tweet, the retailer will be able to measure the effectiveness of the tweet by creating a “purchase” conversion tag and placing it on its purchase confirmation page. Twitter would match each purchase against the consumers who viewed or engaged with the retailer’s Promoted Tweet campaign. The advertiser can then access a report on Twitter which shows the total number of users who converted and the cost per action without identifying any individual who viewed or engaged with the Promoted Tweet. Advertisers can set a maximum time window to credit Twitter between when the shopper saw or interacted with a Promoted Tweet and when the conversion took place. Marketers will then be able to access the tool on Twitter’s ad page, ads.twitter.com.
The rollout of this new tool is Twitter’s latest effort to give marketers more ways to market to its user base following its initial public offering of stock last month, and follows on from Twitter’s recent introduction of retargeting and its expanded Promoted Accounts ad unit to consumers’ timelines on mobile devices.
