Twitter Ads are becoming more and more popular, but the question is, where do you start?

Twitter advertising is becoming more and more necessary for websites and businesses online as other platforms become competitive and costs go up . Everything from building your ad, targeting your ad, retargeting and more can be done using Twitter.

We’re going to walk through building your very first Twitter Ad (from beginning to end).

1. Create a Twitter Ad Account

The first thing that you’ll need to do is log in using Twitter into your advertising account. This can be done by visiting this link:

https://ads.twitter.com

Once you log in to your Twitter advertising account, you’ll be taken to the dashboard of your account. This is the area all your campaigns will appear in when you’ve created them.

2. Building Your Very First Twitter Campaign

Now that you’ve created your account and are on the dashboard page, we want to try creating our first new campaign. So in the top right corner you’ll be able to select a few different goals for you new campaign. These goals include:

• Followers – Building your Twitter follower base
• Website Clicks or Conversions – Send people to your website to purchase, sign up etc.
• Tweet Engagements – Reach more people and drive conversation to engage with your tweets
• App Installs or Engagements – Get people to install or engage with your mobile app
• Leads on Twitter – Collect emails from people who express interest in your offer
• Custom – Create a custom campaign using the old Promoted Tweets form.

If you’re not sure which campaign you want to go with, you can also select the ‘Help Me Choose’ button where Twitter explains in more depth how each different campaign works.

For the purpose of the guide, we’ll go with ‘Website Clicks or Conversions‘ which is the most popular goal for most businesses and websites.

3. Setting Up Our ‘Clicks To Website’ Campaign On Twitter General Settings

Giving Your Campaign A Name

The first thing you’re going to want to do is give your campaign a name. Similar to Facebook ads, you want to make sure you organize your campaigns in a structured way (especially if you’re going to be doing more Twitter ads in the future).

What I usually do is use a template like: [Client Name] – [Goal] [Test Number]

So for this it might be – [Jim’s Plumbing] – Leads 1

Website Tag For Conversion Tracking

Next we’ll want to setup conversion tracking for our goals on our website. Conversion tracking is critical to be able to find out which stages in our sales funnel are being taken when someone clicks our link from a Twitter advertisement.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of conversion tracking as it’s pretty straight forward and similar to the setup Facebook Ads tracking pixel uses (and any other conversion tracking tool) but you’ll need to make sure it’s active so you can see how many people hit your ‘Thank You’ page after they opt in, purchase or complete your goal action.

You have two options, dynamic conversion tracking (which needs some playing around with) or hard coded conversion values.

Here’s the link which explains in depth Twitter’s conversion tracking

Next you’ll want to decide when to begin running your campaign. I’d always go with run continuously unless you’re running an even over a certain time period which you may want to promote for.

4. Adding Your Twitter Ad’s Creative

Now you’re ready to begin making your Twitter ad look amazing so you can get as high as conversions as possible, woo!

Twitter gives you 2 different options. You can compose a new tweet (with the addition of a website card, more on this in a sec) or you can use an existing tweet.

I’d always recommend using a new tweet when running an ad so you can make sure your offer is directly corresponding to your targeted audience.

So what’s this ‘Website Card’?

A website card is essentially an extra part of content which will enhance your tweet. It’s made up of an image, button and a link. Website Cards are great because they allow you to increase the space you have on screen, additionally each element on the card links to your website which means more visits to your website (as you can see below).

Next we’ll need to begin filling in all the space for the ad.

We want to make sure the offer is directly related to our target market.

The Tweet: When you’re creating this yourself, you’ll be using your comapny’s Twitter profile, so just bare that in mind! But you want to give a clear call to action when building out your tweet and not to forget any hashtags.

Website URL: This is where you’ll be sending your traffic. This could be your landing page or your homepage directly if it’s optimized to grab leads or make sales (depending on what your conversion outcome is).

Creative: Twitter actually allows you to upload a larger image if needed (unlike Facebook) and you can drag the image to be shown within the designated pixel limits. You can customize this with text or just a stock image, you’ll need to split test to see which one converts higher!

Headline: Twitter gives you 70 characters total to add a headline, so make sure you use them and the offer is consistent through your ad.

Call to Action: Twitter has a variety of calls to action in their adds. Some of which include: Read More, Shop Now, View Now, Visit Now, Book Now, Learn More, Play Now, Bet Now, Donate, Apply Here, Quote Here, Order Now and Book Tickets.

Card Name: This is a private label you give your card name not visible to users. It’s wise to keep them organised so in the future when you have more, you’ll be able to know which card is which.

5. Targeting Your Twitter Ad

Location Targeting

Twitter’s location targeting is one of the best I’ve come across.

You can target all the way down to the post code. Depending on what your offer is, you can decide whether you want to target your ad nationally, state wide, city wide or just a certain suburb.

You can also import multiple locations at a time, by listing them using the button right next to the location.

Gender Targeting

This one’s pretty straightforward –

You’ll be able to select which gender you want to target right off the bat.

Language + Device + Platforms + Carriers

These are additional targeting options which can be used. While most people will probably not use them too often, I’ve included a screenshot below for convenience. To learn more on targeting languages and devices, you can read more here.

Twitter Keyword Targeting and Follower Targeting

Probably the most important part about creating your Twitter ad is targeting of your keywords and followers to make sure your offer goes out to the right audience.

Let’s begin with ‘keyword targeting‘.

You’ve got 4 options when you choose your keywords:

Broad: All words, or similar variants, must be present in the text. Words can be in any order. Other words can be present. Prefix a word with ‘+’ to avoid matching variants of it.
Phrase Match: The search query must contain the phrase with the word in the order written.
Negative Match: Avoid searches that include all of these keywords no matter what order they appear.
Negative Phrase: Avoid searches that include this phrase somewhere in the query even if other words are before or after it.

You can select the keywords which match your target audience, and allows you to hyper target conversation topics in specific areas. For example, I could target local terms like ‘plumbing [state name]’ or ‘plumbing [suburb name]’ and really drill down into the audience I’m looking to capture.

Twitter also allows you to target other people’s accounts. Once you’ve added in a couple of users you’d like to target, Twitter will also make you some recommendations too.

Similarly to Facebook Ads, you can target other people’s pages and their followers with your offer.

This makes it extremely easy to penetrate a niche using your Facebook ads and achieve clicks to your website (given you have a convincing offer!).

Interest Targeting

Another area of building your Twitter add includes selecting categories your target audience would be interested in. This is a lot more broad than the keyword and location targetting, however may still be beneficial in your ad.

Bare in mind, this is in addition to the usernames you entered above.

Retargeting Using Twitter Advertising Platform

This is one of my favorite part of the advertising platform Twitter has to offer (same with Facebook!).

Here you have 2 different options.

Upload Your Own List (Emails, Twitter IDs or Mobile Advertising Ids)

This allows you to upload your existing customer database and retarget them Twitter ads for example. You can use this to serve your ads to a very specific list of people who you’ve already engaged with.

Track Website Visitors

This is adding a pixel to your website which allows you to retarget people who take specific actions on your website. So for example if you add a pixel on your ‘Product 1’ page, you can re-target people with an offer specifically about that product they visited but didn’t end up purchasing.

TV Targeting 

These TV targeting options are limited to a few countries (Mostly the United States)

TV Targeting: Target users who engage with television programs in a specific market. Some shows and ads will be available in multiple markets.

TV Show Targeting: Reach engaged users during 2 targeted windows.

1. Continuously at any time the campaign is live.
2. During and immediately follow new telecast airings only

Add Networks: Select networks to target users engaged with all shows airing on any selected channel during your campaign. TV targeting by network will reach users engaged with all shows that air on the channel while your campaign is active. Twitter users will only be available for targeting for a limited window around each telecast.

Add Genres: Select genres to target users engaged with all shows matching any selected genre during your campaign.

For more information on TV Targeting you can read up on Twitter’s article over here.

Behavior Targeting

This function is only restricted to the united states however provides some great targeting information on demographics around the USA. Twitter digs deep into demographics and behaviors of people across a variety of categories as seen below if you select ‘Browse Categories’.

Limit Targeting Of Audiences

This is where you can exclude selected audiences who have not taken the next step in your sales funnel.

So let’s take an example – you could have 2 re-targeting audiences:

One for your ‘Core Product’ and the other for your ‘Upsell’.

Here you can include people who have purchased your core product, while excluding people who haven’t taken your up sell.

This works well as you can plug your leaky sales funnel using Twitter as people go through your funnel.

5. Setting a Budget For Your Twitter Ad

Twitter allows you to set a ‘per day’ spend on your ad and also allows you to select either an ‘Automatic’ bid to optimize for best results, or you can set your own manual bid by selecting the ‘Show Advanced Options’ button.

Twitter has some neat features when it comes to bidding.

The first thing you’ll notice when you select ‘advanced bidding’ is that you will see what other advertisers are bidding for the same targeting options you’ve selected earlier in the post.

Then you can make an educated decision on what you would like to use as a bidding amount. ( I find it really interesting to compare the bids on Twitter to both Google Adwords and Facebook Ads to see what the competition on each platform is like).

The other really cool option is selecting the pace at which the daily budget is allocated as seen above. This is something which Facebook Ads doesn’t support and can be very helpful in who your ad goes out to and when. For example, if your asking for calls but aren’t open 24/7 you may want it shown during the day.

Total Budget

Lastly Twitter gives you the option to select a total budget. This allows you to put a cap on how much you spend over the life time of the Twitter ad.

6. The Final Check!

Once you’ve filled out all the parts in your Twitter campaign, you should so nothing highlighted in red and good to go according to the information you’ve entered.

The link will be green and you can make sure everything you’ve selected is ready to go!

Once you click the ‘Launch Campaign’ button at the bottom of the screen you’ll either be prompted to add your credit card information in if you haven’t done yet already, or you will be taken to your dashboard to see how your ad is performing!

See below for a preview of what that would look like:

7. You’re Done!

Now you’ve setup your very own Twitter ad! Wasn’t that hard was it?

You can see how powerful the platform has become to serve ads to your target market. Be careful not to go out spending too much initially as you’re still becoming familiar with the platform.

I’d love to hear some of your case studies and experiences with twitter advertising you may have had.

If you have any questions, shoot me a comment below or message me on Facebook and Twitter below and I’ll get onto it!