In an announcement made on their blog yesterday, Twitter is releasing a new product for their advertisers called “tailored audiences.” After testing tailored audiences for several months it is finally available worldwide.
Twitter’s Product Manager, Abhishek Shrivastava, describes it as:
…a new way for advertisers to define your own groups of existing and potential customers, and connect with them on Twitter with relevant messages.
Tailored audiences allows advertisers to reach users who have shows an interest in a particular company or product category, otherwise known in the digital advertising world as retargeting.
In order to get relevant ads to the right users, one way Twitter will go about doing this is having the advertiser share browser cookies through an ads partner. Twitter will then use that information to tailor Promoted Tweets to the corresponding Twitter accounts.
Twitter goes on to say in the blog post they have been beta testing tailored audiences with select advertisers with impressive results, including up to 195% higher conversion rates. Twitter is making it as easy as possible for users to get started with tailored audiences by teaming up with leading ad partners, including: Adara, AdRoll, BlueKai, Chango, DataXu, Dstillery, Lotame, Quantcast, ValueClick, and [x+1].
In an effort to protect the privacy of its users, Twitter is offering the option to opt-out of receiving retargeted ads by checking the box next to “Promoted content” in the privacy settings. Additionally, if users have Do Not Track enabled in their browser Twitter will not receive browser cookies from their ads partners.
Twitter hints at future possibilities of expanding beyond just targeting recent visitors to your website. How else do you think tailored audiences could be used in the future? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.
