Although X has courted controversy. it has consistently remained one of the top platforms for netizens to discuss anything and everything, whether it’s election results or a new sneaker line. But as a performance marketer, why should you care about X (Twitter) ? Should X Ads be on your radar?
We feel. that leveraging X Ads for marketing campaigns should be a no-brainer in today’s world, when 68% of customers want to stay updated on new brand offerings on social media. For those still on the fence or looking to understand more about X Ads before taking the leap, here is your guide to X ads – types, audience creation, budget and expectations from X Ads.
Jump ahead to:
X Ads : An Introduction
X ads are an advertising tool that allows you to target X users, formerly Twitter. X Ads will be visible to users even when they’re logged out of X. They have a clear ‘Ad’ label mentioned on them. X offers marketers various types of ad formats:
1. Promoted X Ads
Previously known as ‘Promoted Tweets,’ these look like regular X posts and are targeted to users who aren’t following your X profile yet. Promoted X Ads also have a ‘Promoted’ label on the bottom to differentiate them from regular posts and can include videos, moments, and carousels apart from text and images.
2. Follower X Ads
Referred to as ‘Promoted Accounts’ earlier, Follower X Ads promote your X account by targeting users who might meet your customer profile but aren’t following you yet. Follower X Ads are ideal for marketers looking to drive brand awareness and are visible in the ‘Who to follow’ section of a user’s feed.
3. X Takeover ads
X Takeover ad format positions your brand on X’s premium real estate, giving you the best placement X has to offer. This naturally makes it more expensive than other X ads. You can choose two placements-
Timeline takeover : ensures your ad is the first ad a user sees when they access X
Trend takeover : Positions your ad alongside trending topics in the Explore tab.
4. X Amplify
X Amplify Ad format allows you to place X ads via video content from extremely relevant publishers. You can choose X Amplify Pre-roll, which allows you to select from 15+ categories of videos to showcase as pre-roll video ads, or X Amplify Sponsorships, which involves partnering with a particular publisher.
5. X’s Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)
With X DPA, showcase your most relevant offerings to the right customers. X DPA retargeting also helps you target ads with offerings that users have already engaged with on your site.
6. X Collection Ads
X Collection Ads showcase all your offerings’ details in a single unified view and provide users with a hassle-free browsing experience. They can also help steer users through different offerings, guiding them to landing pages for the specific offerings they’re interested in. X Collection ads give X users a personalized customer journey and drive diverse engagement channels.
Additional read: 6 Social Media Optimization Strategies That Will Change Your Game
What Makes X a Good Marketing Platform?
Here are the benefits of leveraging X:
- Drives Customer Engagement: X is the 3rd most used social network and has an average engagement rate of 4.6%. And since X thrives on immediacy, marketers have the unique opportunity to ride the wave of trending discussions, facilitating user interaction in real time.
- Improves Brand Awareness: As mentioned above, X has 335.7 million monthly users, offering you a tremendous audience for your ads. Further, 76% of X users say they have purchased a product because of X conversations, and 80% leverage X to discover new products.
- Increases Website Traffic: X can help drive traffic to your primary website. You can leverage X as a distribution channel to share links to your articles, ebooks, case studies, product pages, etc. This helps you boost your lead generation efforts as well.
Additional read: Building Brand Awareness: Here’s everything you need to know
Leveraging Audience Insights in X
X offers ‘Audience Insights,’ a tool that helps you understand your customers better. Audience Insights in X Ads offers insight into age groups, interests, preferences, gender, device type, and more to help you create targeted and relevant X ads that drive marketing goals. You can leverage X Ads location insights to personalize X ads as per the user’s location and can also time your ads to have them visible when your X audience is most active.
Smart Budget Allocation in X
Here’s how you can make the most out of your X ads budget:
- Define Objectives: Ascertain your marketing goal. Is it increasing website visits, driving followers, or boosting engagement? This will ultimately be your guiding light.
- Daily vs. Total Budget: You can set a daily and a total budget for X Ads. While the former restricts how much you spend in a day, the latter regulates the allocation for the entire campaign. Selecting one will depend on your campaign’s length and intensity.
- Manual vs Automatic Bidding: Manual bidding gives you more control over your campaign and allows you to set your maximum bid amount for Cost per Click (CPC), Cost per lead (CPL), etc. Automatic bidding involves X Ads optimizing your bid amounts to drive your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
- Tracking and Tweaking: Monitor campaign performance and adjust bids or reallocate the budget as needed.
- Analyze Ad Placements: You can place your X ads in timelines, profiles, etc. Be sure to analyze each X ad format in relation to its cost to optimize your budget allocation.
- Make Seasonal Adjustments: Holidays, sports events, etc., might result in a sudden surge in X ads competition, requiring you to raise your bid amounts for ad visibility.
- A/B Testing: Always leverage A/B testing to ascertain the X ads version that performs best with your audience.
Additional read: X (Twitter) Ad Campaigns – The Most Important Metrics to Track and Optimize
What Type of Content Performs Best on X?
Here are top performing content types:
- Text-only posts that are quick and concise and include attention-grabbing headlines, thought-provoking questions, and witty one-liners
- High-quality visual content such as videos, GIFs, and images
- User Generated Content (UGC) such as customer testimonials, reviews, etc., help offer social proof for your claims
- Ads and posts about industry trends and news can help establish industry leadership
- Contests and promotions can encourage engagement and drive website traffic
Additional Reading: Images or Videos for Facebook Ads – Which is Better?
How Much Do X Ads Cost?
X ads can typically cost between $0.26 to $0.50 per first action and rise to between $1.01 to $2 per follow for promoted accounts.
Drive the Success of your X Ads Marketing Campaigns with EasyInsights
X ads can be a game-changer for your marketing initiatives. But as is the case, with all marketing tools, you need to keep a finger on how X Ad’s performing to ensure you’re on the right path. And while you have X’s own analytics to bolster that, it can offer only so much insight into your campaigns.
If you’re looking to drive your ROAS and get a complete understanding of how your X ads are performing in relation to other campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, etc., consider integrating EasyInsights. With this no-code CDP, you can source data from over 200 sources onto a single platform to answer questions like:
- Is my budget allocated efficiently?
- What’s my overall marketing ROAS?
- What are my top-performing marketing channels?
Don’t sit in the dark any longer. Book a demo now!
How EasyInsights can help you work better with X Ads Platform
EasyInsights works with X Ads data for data activation and data enrichment in a few key ways:
Data Collection and Transformation:
- EasyInsights connects directly to your X ads platform via APIs, allowing it to access and extract the raw data .
- Data Transformation: EasyInsights then cleans, normalizes, and enriches the X Ads data to make it usable for activation purposes. This may involve tasks like:
- Formatting data: Ensuring all X Ads data points are in a consistent format.
- Handling missing values: Filling in missing X Ads data points or removing them according to your preferences.
- Enriching data: Adding additional X Ads data points from other sources to create a more comprehensive picture of your customers.
Data Activation:
- Segmentation and Targeting: EasyInsights allows you to segment your X Ads audience based on various criteria like demographics, behavior, and interests using the enriched ad platform data.
- Multi-channel Marketing: You can then use these X Ad segments to activate your audience across different marketing channels like email, social media, and advertising platforms.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): This data can be used to personalize outreach and interactions with customers within your CRM system.
- Marketing Attribution: EasyInsights can help you understand how X Ads contribute to conversions, and optimize your marketing spend accordingly.
Key Feature:
- Offers features like customer data platform (CDP) capabilities, marketing attribution, creating audiences and events.
- Focuses on reverse ETL and offers pre-built integrations with various marketing platforms.
EasyInsights is a marketer’s preferred tool for first party data activation.
In this age of cross-channel marketing, EasyInsights offers a comprehensive platform to collect, store, and transform all your first-party data.
EasyInsights enhances marketing campaign efficiency in a cookieless landscape with accurate ad signals. It helps brands step away from surface-level metrics and unleash the potential of first-party data to optimize marketing strategies, ensuring a superior Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). It does all this, while being a highly affordable no-code platform with an exceptional customer support apparatus.
Sign up for a demo today to see EasyInsights in action.
