Twitter's latest advertising enhancement promises to deliver a far more engaging and conversion-rich product for travel marketers seeking to target specific buying behaviors on the real-time platform.
The brand has announced Partner Audiences, which bring knowledge of off-Twitter user behavior into the targeting mechanism used for advertising. So rather than being limited to on-platform behaviors and content, advertisers can now see more about user behavior and then serve ads against those behaviors.
For example, a coffee shop could target users based on their beverage buying behaviors to ensure peak relevance for its ads.
Travel also has its own subcategory, allowing travel marketers to go after particular behaviors of their target markets. As the ad interface explains, "these audiences from Twitter partners are based on actual online and offline behaviors and characteristics."
The data comes from companies enlisted as Marketing Platform Partners who have more aggregated data and consumer profiles than Twitter has on its own.
Thankfully, even though the feature is automatically opt-in, Twitter users are being given the choice to participate under privacy settings with a box called "Tailor ads based on information shared by ad partners." In order to avoid the creep factor, the brand assures that it will "have a minimum audience size for all tailored audiences to avoid overly specific targeting." This means that users who want tailored ads will likely be more willing to engage.
Twitter's announcement follows on the heels of Instagram's new Carousel Ads rollout but is a bit more applicable to the everyday marketer as the Twitter ad platform is already open to all businesses. Whereas Instagram still has a closed platform, you can take advantage of this enhanced, data-rich targeting immediately.
The ability to segment Twitter audiences according to actual purchase behavior, and not just on-platform behavior, is an intriguing development that ought to improve engagement and bring Twitter advertising more closely aligned with advertisers' ROI expectations.
NB: Targeted ROI image courtesy Shutterstock.