Until now, advertising on Twitter has been a manual process, launching ads one at a time with Twitter’s self-serve tool or their direct sales team. This process has made execution of multiple types of creative and optimizing ads in real-time difficult and inefficient.
In the past week, Twitter has responded to advertiser demand by launching its new Ads API platform. The new platform allows businesses to create tools that better execute, manage and optimize advertising campaigns on Twitter. Running a Twitter campaign just got much more attractive.
The Ads API allows marketers to run Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts campaigns (Promoted Trends will still be sold exclusively by Twitter) with more speed and at higher levels of automation and optimization.
Twitter Advertising Just Got Real
Twitter’s debut of its Ads API is following the lead of Facebook and LinkedIn, which have already launched their own advertising APIs and benefited from an explosion in advertising growth.
The Ads API makes advertising on Twitter more efficient, measurable and, in all likelihood more effective. The news is being welcomed by advertisers just as much as it is by Twitter, which is predicted to generate “at least $1 billion in sales in 2014,” according to Bloomberg.
But what about users? Twitter’s considered this. Despite the new ability to execute more ad campaigns at a higher rate, the Ads API is not expected to bombard users with more advertisements. Users are expected to see the same volume because marketers will be able to see what’s working and what isn’t earlier, removing underperforming ads as quickly as they’re replaced. This means users should see better ads that resonate more and A/B testing at scale becomes a possibility.
Stronger Targeting Capabilities
Twitter is introducing the API with five launch partners, including Adobe, Salesforce, Hootsuite, Shift and TBG Digital. The API partners are already working with advertisers to develop the future of Twitter advertising, creating stronger targeting capabilities. The partnerships are benefitting Twitter as well, allowing the social media platform to continue to simply focus on what it is best at: fostering engagement.
Twitter’s advertising products previously could be drilled down to the level of interest, but because the API allows marketers to take Twitter ads’ data outside of Twitter, they’ll now have the ability to layer it over their own customer data to create another level of Twitter audience profiles.
More Responsive
One of the big benefits for marketers will be their newfound ability to make Twitter work more seamlessly with other advertising initiatives. The Ads API will allow Twitter campaigns to be more integrated with campaigns on other channels running side-by-side on a single platform if needed. More importantly, marketers will be able to manage their Twitter advertising within the same platforms they manage their other social media channels, allowing them to respond to consumers, share content and deploy ads simultaneously.
Twitter’s Ads API brings everything together, making insights easier to access, act-on and leverage across social media and traditional channels. The streamlined, all-in-one interface will allow marketers to see how everything is performing and allocate dollars based on performance quickly.
Get to Insights Faster
With improved targeting and integration comes more in-depth learning, accelerating discovery of insights. Access to the real-time performance of ads reaching more defined audience profiles escalates the rate of testing, which ultimately yields more refined content in a shorter period of time. In this way, the Ads API will help improve ad effectiveness, ensuring the ads created by and for your brand are not the ones Twitter has to remove due to poor performance.
This Is the Beginning
Out of all the social networks, Twitter is arguably the most real-time in nature, being used by people to connect with others around shared experiences like the Super Bowl or The Oscars. As Oreo and other brands demonstrated during the Super Bowl, speed counts when the conversation zeitgeist changes. The Ads API allows marketers to optimize their ads in real-time the same way they already are with their content.
A rush of products and services allowing marketers to gather, analyze and act on real-time information is just around the corner.
Moving Fast
Real-time marketing is becoming the standard, not the exception, and Twitter’s Ads API bringsthe barrier for marketers to live and thrive in a rapidly evolving environment where seconds count a bit lower. The tools are getting better, and with a team in place with the ability to move quickly and the freedom to act on opportunities, a brand will be able to be increase its nimbleness in this environment. If your brand isn’t prepared to create, respond, amplify and optimize at near real-time, it will likely be left behind. Twitter’s Ads API is just one sign of this larger trend.