One of the core principles of advertising is proper audience targeting. Reaching out to the wrong audience is a waste of both time and budget, and can only serve to hurt the success of your campaigns. Thankfully, our options in online advertising have matured over time to offer ever more granular targeting. Twitter is no exception, and they’ve recently provided their advertisers with a new remarketing opportunity.
What is Remarketing?
Oddly enough, the definition of the word “remarketing” has undergone some change in the last decade. For the purposes of this post, Twitter uses it to refer to ads that target users who have previously interacted with your company. This interaction could take place on Twitter, but now you can filter for users that have actually visited your web site. These ads are used to help build and maintain brand recognition and could net you some additional followers, retweets, and conversions.
The Internet Remembers
What happens on your website doesn’t have to stay on your website. I discussed the process of setting up Twitter conversion tracking in this post. The process for setting up a remarketing campaign starts with that conversion tracking code. As explained in the post, you’ll click the “Conversion Tracking” tab at the top of the Twitter Ads interface, then click the big blue button to set up conversion tracking.
Now you’ll see the “Create new website tag” form. Twitter considers it a best practice to set up remarketing tags with a “Site visit” conversion type. This will maximize your potential audience, but if you want a more specific type of remarketing (e.g. post-purchase advertising) you can set it up that way.
Once you’ve done that, click “Create Tag” and insert the code in the appropriate places on your site. You can generate more than one of these tags if you want to create a broad variety of custom audience targeting options. Remember that for reporting purposes in the Twitter interace, conversions for all of these tags will still roll up to the conversion type.
Creating a Remarketing Tweet
Remarketing ads are created through the same process as other Twitter ads. When you come to the targeting options, you’ll just select “Tailored audiences”, then “Website visitors”. You can then select which of your remarketing audiences to target.
When you run a remarketing campaign, you know that your audience has already had some interaction with your brand. This creates an opportunity to turn occasional visitors into more loyal customers.
