Week 11 – Twitter Ads

Starting Twitter Ads

I read somewhere that an event like Super Bowl was a great time to run Twitter Ads. I pushed hard to get the research done and to have a Twitter Ads campaign ready to run on Sunday morning before Super Bowl.

It was just as well as woke on Monday morning with the cold from hell and my brain was not capable of thinking or reacting. I spent most of the week just staring and coughing. The Twitter Ads training was good enough to get me through and to give me enough material to do a review and to run a 2nd campaign to test things further. Just as well as the week felt like a week from hell.

Week 11 Review

Dean Holland did say no excuses – I had one this week. I started the week with a monster cold and was just not able to think in amongst the hacking coughing. Now I did not have a long list of tasks and I was able to get ahead of the curve on one task which I could just let run
– Twitter Ads. As with last week, I did make a video journal – what I did and what I was thinking about changing.

Here is the week’s review against the tasks I set out last week.

Step one is to have a look at the rolling 28 days on Twitter.

Impressions went up 40k (24%) of which 11k came from ads. Profile visits went up 28% – 400 more people looking at the profile compared to last week. It would be great to grab 1% of those every week as opt-ins.

• Twitter ads: Complete research for first 5 ad groups: The focus for the week was to get Twitter ads research done. I read an article that suggested that an event like Super Bowl was a strong time to advertise because people were looking at the devices while they were watching the TV = somewhat captive audience. That got me pushing on Sunday night (my time) to get the ads up and running. I finished the research. I picked the 5 ad groups and I set up the campaign to run the 24 hours before and during the Super Bowl.
• Solo Ads: Send out 2 Guaranteed Solo Mails: Sent one on Twitter Ads. Got amazing clicks but no signups. Also got some solid traffic to the Affiliate Marketers Playbook one sent out the week before – somewhat delayed responses.
• Organic Twitter: Improve organic reach process to improve engagement. I did stare at Twitter a lot but it was haphazard – aim is to share about 3 or 4 articles a day to add to the auto posting. I did work out how to get it working on the iPad. I failed to post much. I did do some follow/unfollow work on one or two days but with no patterns
• Launch Pros: Continue through training: None done.
• Review January performance and plan February: Not done. I reviewed Twitter ads campaign and ran a 2nd campaign – the month review felt like a bayonet the wounded exercise = given how disrupted January was. Maybe I am just being a slow learner here – the week produced 897 clicks and only 4 opt-ins. Over 100 clicks a day feels like good traffic – got to address the landing page problem. Because I borrowed this from a friend who had good results, maybe I was complacent.

Reviewing Twitter Ads

Quick summary. I ran two ad campaigns. Here is the side by side comparison. The essential differences were group 1 was males only. Group 2 shifted to females in some groups and mixed in others. I widened the topics and leaders in some groups for group 2.

Side by results show that the 2nd group was much more cost effective than the 1st (cost per impression and cost per click). The 2nd group did confirm the leading category and it suggested some biases in other categories.

Key lessons coming out of the 2 campaigns. I must say the whole thing got me quite confused – maybe it was the cold wracked brain.

• Landing page is not converting well (less than solo ads)
• Might have had a Super Bowl effect (Retire Ad 1) given the better results from Retire Ad 2
• Females are more responsive to retirement topics (i.e., keywords)
• Males are more engaged with retirement leaders
• Software as the lead influencer is a strong category

Twitter Ads Training

I must say I was looking for better guidance from the Twitter Ads training. Like so much internet marketing training, it is good at telling you which buttons to press. It does need updating to Twitter’s platform changes.

What it does less well is to create a STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK above campaign level

• What type of landing page to use?
• What type of lead magnet to use?
• What are the guidelines for creatives? There are examples of good and bad ads but no real guiding principles
• Which ad type works best for which campaign objective? This is discussed in general in passing
• What are good levels of metrics to aim for? cost per impression? clicks per 1000 impressions; leads per click?
• What are the appropriate audiences sizes?
• How to change targeting to reduce wasted clicks

All I know is I halved the cost from one campaign to the next and got more impressions but lower clicks and more opt-ins. Data helps but guidelines and data work better together.

Week 12 Tasks

• Twitter ads: Progress to testing 3 alternate creatives as per video next steps (1. a more compelling
  offer; test a new lead magnet idea; test a video creative)
• Lead Magnet: Create one new lead magnet idea
• Weekly Webinar: Dean Holland runs a weekly webinar each Tuesday. I have not been paying attention. This is easy to drive traffic to. Add a weekly mailing to target the webinar. Run Twitter Ads as part of the test process – use the best category (Software) and run a campaign with the core group; a younger group; a UK group matching the best US group. Why UK? Dean Holland comes from the UK.
• Guaranteed Solo Mails: Run 2 solo ads
• Launch Pros – go to launch as windows are opening on some exciting stuff (e.g., reconditioned Samsung and Apple phones) with support from Michael Devlin.

Resources

Twitter: Follow me on Twitter @Stratocharge

Weekly Webinar: Dean Holland runs a weekly webinar. The links go live during Friday for the Tuesday webinar (6pm EST; 3pm PST; 11pm UK; 10am AEST Wednesday). Register here whenever the link is live or email me mark@markcarrington.com.