Prasant Naidu
As a business you are always interested in understanding customer behavior after he lands on your online store. Implemented by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, conversion tracking for websites enables you to measure your return on investment by tracking the actions users take after viewing or engaging with your ads.
In 2013, Twitter announced the general availability of conversion tracking, a measurement and reporting tool which helps advertisers to understand the full conversion impact of impressions and engagements from Promoted Tweets so they can properly optimize their campaigns.
Detailing on how it worked, Twitter added: “Let’s say a shoe retailer wants to measure how a specific Promoted Tweet campaign drove purchases on their website. Using conversion tracking, the retailer would create a “purchase” conversion tag and place it on their purchase confirmation page. When a user reaches that page, the tag reports to Twitter that a purchase event has occurred. Twitter then matches that event against the set of users who have viewed or engaged with any valid Promoted Tweet campaign. Campaign analytics report the total number of users that converted and cost per action (CPA) without identifying who viewed or engaged with the Promoted Tweet, allowing the advertiser to focus on the campaigns that are driving the most cost-effective purchases.”
Recently, Twitter added two enhancements to the conversion tracking – support for transaction values and key conversion tags.
Talking about the Transaction values, Abhishek Shrivastava – Product Manager, Revenue informed that the feature lets you view the sales (or conversion value) that your Promoted Tweet campaigns drove. “The transaction values feature lets you view the sales (or conversion value) that your Promoted Tweet campaigns drove. These values are aggregated and reported back in your Twitter Ads analytics dashboard to provide insights on your ROI from your Promoted Tweet campaigns.”
The other feature key conversions tag lets you choose a single conversion event for the campaigns you want to optimize. This selection also lets you view distilled analytics within Twitter’s Ads UI, showing only the types of conversions you care most about during a particular campaign.
“Suppose a flower shop wants to use Twitter Ads to drive more sales of their Easter bouquets. Once the shop places a website tag on the final conversion page for the bouquet and selects that tag as the key tag for their campaign, Twitter can automatically start to optimize the campaign towards driving more conversions on the bouquet sale page. The shop will also have the ability to view the number of bouquet purchases in their Twitter Ads analytics dashboard, as soon as those conversions occur. Because Twitter conversion tracking works in a cross-device fashion, even if a user sees the flower shop’s ad on a mobile device but later converts on a desktop, Twitter Ads analytics will be able to track and report that conversion,” Abhishek enlightened on Twitter’s advertising blog.
Waves Audio Ltd. and Live Nation are the early testers of the transaction values feature and the results have been positive for Twitter.
Waves Audio, an audio solutions provider for the professional, broadcast and consumer electronics markets, built New Year holiday excitement on Twitter with special promotions on software plugins for sound engineers. The Waves Audio team used Twitter’s website clicks or conversions objective and targeting such as interests and tailored audiences to drive high-intent site visits.
Waves’ Year-End Party is almost over – Last Chance to Save Big this year! http://t.co/zppMtH1Oj1 pic.twitter.com/ACzIccib7r
— Waves Audio (@WavesAudioLtd) December 31, 2014
The company reveals that their investment in Twitter Ads during that period resulted in a 770 percent return on advertising investment. “We’re very pleased with our return on investment in Twitter Ads,” said David Corman, Waves’ Online Marketing Manager.
Similarly, Live Nation had run Promoted Tweet campaigns using the Website Card to drive ticket sales for popular music acts. LiveNation’s analytics now reveal that they drove a return on ad investment of 819 percent during the testing period.
Even with a weak user growth, Twitter posted a healthy profit for Q4 2014. It earned $ 0.12 per share on an adjusted basis on revenue of $ 479 million during the period. With strong financial results since its debut, Twitter expects to bring in $ 440 million to $ 450 million in revenue during the current, first quarter of 2015. Adding up features like this for marketers looking to measure the ROI of their Twitter ad spend is going to help its expectations.
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