Twitter Partners With Nielsen for Brand Campaign Surveys

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As more brands incorporate Twitter advertising into their standard online budgets, the company needs to offer sophisticated measurement methods. Twitter is pairing with Nielsen to do just that. For the past few weeks a handful of key strategic brand partners across industries have been running surveys to test brand impact of their ads on the platform. The surveys show up as tweets within user feeds, something Twitter believes will work better than pop-up surveys brands typically run across the web.

"Some of our most strategic marketers have been running with the platform," said Twitter Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain during a breakfast gathering among a small number of reporters in conjunction with Advertising Week in New York this morning. Bain (left) argued that standard pop-up surveys online have not worked as well as Twitter's will because pop-ups "are completely disjointed with the consumer experience."

Instead, the new Twitter offering is "a completly integrated and native one" through which a user can answer in "the right context."

"Hey! We have a quick survey for you. Do you have time to answer a few questions?" asks an example of a survey shown to reporters.

The idea is to provide large brands with the same brand impact metrics they apply when measuring other online and traditional ad efforts. The surveys are available in the mobile and desktop environments.

Like similar surveys, the Twitter service measures a control group of users who have not seen an ad against an exposed group who have seen an ad such as a Promoted Tweet. Nielsen and Twitter will provide aggregated results, breaking out results based on who was exposed to an ad and who wasn't, who is a brand follower and who isn't, whether or not a user engaged with the tweet or not, or whether the ad was seen in mobile or on desktop.

Though not available yet, Twitter execs said they have already heard from clients who would like to employ the surveys outside of campaign measurement and as more of a poll function. Such an offering would have clear use for political organizations, for instance.

The surveys as they are currently offered can be targeted as the measured campaigns are - by interest, gender, and location. Surveys can include up to five questions.

The company has ramped up its staff to serve marketers extensively in the past couple years. More than 250 people work directly with agencies and marketers now, said Bain.