Advertisers looking to measure the impact of their Promoted Tweets will now be able to do so with the help of Twitter’s newly launched “conversion tracking” feature.
Yesterday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it was adding a way for businesses advertising on its platform to track the sales activity generated through their efforts. The move is possibly a response to the many analysts and marketers complaining about social media being ineffective in driving e-commerce. However, in fairness, Twitter has been making several advertiser-friendly moves in an effort to energize its revenue generation, and this move would be a welcome one for brands.
To deploy the feature, advertisers can place a tag or code on their website that gets activated once a customer makes a purchase. The code sends the information back to Twitter, who then matches the event against the set of users who are likely to have seen or engaged with the advertisers Promoted Tweet campaign. While individual users who view or interact with the advertising are not identified, the total number of people engaging the ad and making a purchase are identified, giving brands an idea of which campaigns are working and how much their cost per action is.
One of the other major complaints with driving sales through social media is the difficulty of tying a customer’s purchase to an ad they saw or clicked on, since those those two events don’t necessarily follow a direct path to each other, and in fact the time between the two isn’t often short.
Twitter lets the advertisers decide how valid a social media conversion is by allowing them to set an “attribution window” for both post-view and post-engagement conversions. The attribution window could be as short as one day or as long as two weeks since the customer clicked on or saw an ad, to be counted as a valid conversion.
So far Twitter has been testing the feature with a few companies, including Live Nation and Grub Hub, who both reported an increase in ROI on their campaigns. While it isn’t the complete solution for brands tying dollar amounts to their social media efforts, its definitely a big step in the right direction, and with the huge amount of data at its disposal, Twitter will be constantly working to get better at ROI measurement.
