Twitter Offers Conversion Tracking Tool to Measure ROI
Twitter has launched two new conversion tracking features to its analytics toolkit in an attempt to help brands measure a Promoted Tweet campaign's ROI.
Twitter has launched two new conversion tracking features to its analytics toolkit in an attempt to help brands measure a Promoted Tweet campaign's ROI.
Twitter has just released two new updates to its ad measures that better equip brands to measure return on investment (ROI).
Both updates require advertisers to add website tags to the final conversion page of ads. Website tags track downstream action using browser ID cookies and more effectively match lookalike users to advertisers. Now, a transaction values feature allows Twitter advertisers to view sales driven by Promoted Tweets. A second new feature, called key conversions, lets advertisers choose a single action, or conversion event, to target across a campaign.
One of Twitter’s strengths as a paid social platform is the specificity with which it allows marketers to target users, and the addition of conversion analytics tools and tracking capabilities only serves to strengthen Twitter’s utility for spurring action, says Seamas Egan, manager of revenue operations at Campaigner, an email campaign tracking platform.
“Twitter’s value is that it serves up your campaigns to ‘your’ target market based on criteria you define,” says Egan. “The greater insight provided by transaction values will allow Twitter Ad users to analyze their results based on more accurate data and alter their targeting criteria to improve results.”
But even though the new measures are a welcome addition to Twitter’s analytics, some wonder if brands are better off tracking ROI for themselves. “Tracking conversions from several types of Twitter interactions will certainly provide an interesting measure of campaign success on Twitter,” says Bill Guild, vice president of marketing at ChoiceStream. “Unfortunately, many advertisers are already operating fairly sophisticated cross-channel attribution, which closed-loop metrics within Twitter won’t help. The real solution will be for Twitter to open up impression beacons to advertisers so they can apply all of the open digital advertising stack, from optimization to attribution.”
Even though there are still flaws in the system, Guild feels that the updates are definitely an improvement for Promoted Tweets. “An open system is better for many reasons, and the ability to apply open analysis, optimization, and attribution would be best, but this new conversion tracking is definitely a significant improvement,” Guild says.