Tailored Audiences
Tailored audiences are a way to target your existing users and customers to create highly relevant campaigns. There are three main types of tailored audiences.
The first is tailored audiences from lists. These are audiences that are created by uploading your own list of email addresses, mobile phone numbers, Twitter IDs (user IDs or usernames), or mobile advertising IDs. You can do this through Twitter Ads yourself or there is the option to use Twitter’s API partners to create lists.
The second is tailored audiences from web. These are the people that have visited your website. You can collect this data using Twitter’s website tag available through Twitter Ads, or there is the option to use Twitter’s website tag partners.
The third is tailored audiences from mobile apps. These are the people that are using your mobile app, and are collected with conversion tracking for mobile apps.
The audience manager is a tool in your Twitter Ads account for you to review and manage your audiences.
Once an audience is loaded into Twitter Ads, you can use the audience manager to view details about the audience, monitor audience status, view matched audience size, edit, or delete audiences. From the audience manager, you can also create new audiences.
Tailored audiences from lists are created by uploading a file containing your own data. Your records are matched with people who are active on Twitter so that you can target them in your campaigns.
Here are a few examples of how tailored audiences from lists could benefit your business.
- You can reach your existing customers by uploading a list of their email addresses. It’s an opportunity to reach them with a new campaign and drive them to purchase again.
- Collect lists of Twitter usernames (@handles) or obtain curated lists of Twitter IDs from Twitter Certified Products partners to identify and target sets of users who are influential, active or outspoken on a chosen topic.
Create a file containing your own user records.
You might gather these records from your mailing list, past purchasers, or potential customers who have shown intent. You can upload lists of email addresses, mobile phone numbers, Mobile Advertising IDs (iOS Advertising Identifiers and Google Advertising IDs or when not available Android IDs), Twitter usernames or Twitter user IDs.
Create a file that is in an acceptable format and meets the upload requirements.
Supported file formats are .csv and .txt. The maximum file size is 5 GB. Your list can be separated by new lines or commas.
Tip: To respect user privacy, the list must match more than 500 people on Twitter for it to be usable in your campaigns. To reach this minimum size requirement, most lists have several thousand or more entries.
Note: If you are pre-hashing your file (which is optional), please follow these formatting instructions.
- Each file may only contain a single data type, such as device IDs, emails, etc. Include one hashed value per line. Entries must be line separated, terminated with either LF (\n) or CRLF (\r\n). Supported file formats are CSV (.csv) and TXT (.txt).
- The format of each entry must conform to the following normalization requirements.
- For Device IDs, IDFA entries must be lower-cased with dashes (for example: 4b61639e-47cc-4056-a16a-c8217e029462)
- For AdIDs, the original format on device is required, not capitalized with dashes. (For example: 2f5f5391-3e45-4d02-b645-4575a08f86e)
- For Android IDs, the original format on device is required, not capitalized without dashes or spaces. (For example: af3802a465767e36)
- For email addresses, the text must be lowercase, remove leading and trailing spaces. (For example: support@twitter.com)
- For phone numbers, include country (no preceding zeroes e.g. for US use 1 instead of 001) and area code. No characters like +, -, or ( ). (For example: 14083008000, 454083008000)
- For Twitter usernames, do not include the @, make sure the text is lowercased and leading and trailing spaces trimmed. (For example: jack)
- For Twitter user IDs, please use standard integers. (For example: 143567)
The entry on each line must be hashed using SHA256, without a salt. Code samples for hashing can be found at this page on GitHub.
Upload your file.
From the audience manager, create a new list audience. Fill out the form and upload your list.
The processing time for a new list is several hours. You will receive an email when the tailored audience is ready.
FAQ about tailored audiences from lists
I’m having issues uploading my file. What’s wrong?
Don’t close or minimize the browser window while the file is uploading, and only upload one file at a time. For very large files, make sure that you have a reliable and fast internet connection. You can also break your upload into smaller files (and then target them together in campaigns). Pre-hashing might also improve the upload speed for very large file sizes.
I’ve uploaded my list, but it says “audience too small”–how can I make the audience big enough?
There are a few possible ways to fix this. In the case that the matched audience is below the minimum tailored audience size of 500 active Twitter users, make sure that original upload size is several times larger. It often takes thousands of entries just to match 500 users. Another thing to check is to see if there are any formatting errors in the file. If you are pre-hashing the file, make sure that you followed the pre-hashed format requirements.
First, establish a relationship with one of Twitter’s ad partners. All ad partners can manage audiences via API. If you want to create an audience list through a partner using email addresses, our partners are: Acxiom,Datalogix, Epsilon, LiveRamp, MailChimp, Merkle, and our Ads API partners.
Your ads partner will prepare the audiences that you want to target and send them to Twitter, then Twitter will run a match to discover which users in the audience are Twitter users.
Your audiences will not include Twitter users that have opted out using their Twitter privacy settings. Twitter will not match their accounts to information shared by ad partners to tailor ads for them. Twitter will similarly not target your campaigns to mobile devices with Limit Ad Tracking (iOS) or Opt out of interest-based ads (Android) enabled.
Your partner can upload the audiences via API. You can monitor the upload status through audience manager. Once the audiences are loaded into your Twitter Ads account, you can add them to your campaigns.
What is a web audience?
A web audience is a group of active Twitter users that have visited your website. This group is collected by a website tag which you put on your site.
How does the website tag work?
The website tag for remarketing is a snippet of code that’s placed in pages of your website. The website tag allows you to remarket to users on Twitter based on visits to the websites where your website tag is present.
When a user visits a web page that contains the website tag, a Twitter cookie is placed on the user’s browser, and the unique ID of that cookie is recorded so that it can be included in the audience for remarketing on Twitter. As users visit tag-containing web pages, Twitter conducts a match to determine whether the user is also a Twitter user. The targetable audience that is made available to advertisers in their Twitter Ads account is the subset of visitors who both visited the tag-containing web page, and are Twitter users.
For details, see the website tag for remarketing page.
When you set up the website tag for remarketing, it will create a new audience automatically.
How to create or remove a tailored audience from web.
In the website tags tab of the conversion tracking page, click edit for the tag you would like to change, and in the create a tailored audience for remarketing section, edit the “create a tailored audience” checkbox.
You can also use a third-party partner to create audiences derived from cookie IDs. You can also use a third-party partner to create audiences derived from cookie IDs. Some of our partners are: Adara, AdRoll, BlueKai, Chango,Conversant, DataXu, Dstillery, Krux, Lotame, MediaMath, Perfect Audience, Quantcast, Vizury, and [x+1].
After authorizing Twitter to receive the partner data, you will see the web audiences in the audience manager and will be able to target the audiences in your campaigns.
What are tailored audiences from mobile app events?
Audiences from mobile app events are groups of people who have taken a specific action in your app, such as install or sign up. You can define these actions by setting up conversion tracking for mobile apps with one of our mobile measurement partners or by using Answers, powered by Fabric. To learn how to do this, see the conversion tracking for mobile apps page. By default, when you set up a mobile app conversion tracking event, we will create a tailored audience that you can use for remarketing or exclusion in your campaigns.
Where can I see my existing audiences from mobile app events?
They are listed in the audience manager.
How do I create new tailored audiences from mobile app events?
When you create a new mobile app event, it will create a new audience automatically.
How do I change whether audience collection is enabled for an existing mobile app event?
In the mobile app events tab of the conversion tracking page, you can see whether or not audience collection is enabled for each event in the remarketing settings column. Click edit for the event you would like to change, and in the remarketing settings section, select or deselect the “create a tailored audience” checkbox.
You can exclude them in the limit targeting by excluding tailored audiences section.
What is the size requirement for a tailored audience? Why does it say “audience too small”?
To respect user privacy, the list must match more than 500 people on Twitter for it to be usable in your campaigns. Lists that fall short of this requirement will say “audience too small” in the audience manager, and cannot be used for campaign targeting.
What does “expand reach by targeting similar users” mean?
Checking this box lets you expand the reach of your tailored audiences campaigns through lookalike modeling. Lookalike modeling uses proprietary algorithms that consider similarities with the modeled user such as interests, location, demographic attributes and engagement patterns.
Reach expansion is useful when the audience is relatively small, or any time you want to drive higher campaign volume. The size of the audience with reach expansion will be approximately 10-20x that of the size of the seed audience.
In the case of ads partners who also offer reach expansion, you can enable it on the ads partner side, or on the Twitter side, but not both.
What is lookalike only targeting?
Lookalike only targeting is when an advertiser applies reach expansion to a tailored audience and then excludes the seed audience, resulting in an audience of users that are similar to the seed audience. Lookalike only targeting can be used for user acquisition campaigns for which the advertiser wants to reach Twitter users most like their existing customers, without wasting impressions or spend on users they have already acquired.
Why does my audience size fluctuate?
There are periodic updates your tailored audience size so that it reflects the most current number of active Twitter users.
Is there audience-level reporting?
You can target multiple audiences in a single campaign and we offer audience-level reporting. When multiple audiences are included in a single campaign you can view a breakout of impressions, engagements and spend by audience. To access these analytics, drill down to an individual campaign in the campaign activity dashboard, then click the audiences icon in the upper left part of the page.Please note a current limitation: when you select ”target all audiences” in the campaign setup, reporting across the individual audiences is not possible. However, if you select all audiences using the browse audiences button, the reporting will be available for all those audiences.
Is additional targeting available for tailored audiences campaigns?
Yes, you can additionally target by geo, device and gender for tailored audiences campaigns just like with other Twitter campaigns. Note, however, that the choice to layer on additional targeting may result in lower campaign volume than otherwise. It is not recommended to layer highly granular geo-targeting onto tailored audiences campaigns, because it is especially likely to result in very low campaign volume.
Can I delete an audience?
Yes, you can delete an audience by disabling the mobile app event using your tracking partner. Once your app event is disabled, you will see a “delete” option for the associated audience in the audience manager. Once you have selected and confirmed the “delete” option, the audience will be removed.
With Tailored audiences for lists, you can quickly and easily delete an audience from the audience manager. On the audience manager page, in the far right column there is a “delete” option to delete the uploaded list.
Additionally, for Tailored Audiences for Website Visitors, you cannot delete an audience once it has been created. If an audience is created from the Twitter Online Conversion for Website Visitors pixel, and you delete the pixel, then the audience will not add new users. If an audience is created from a Partner Online Conversion pixel, the audience will not add any new users, and will delete users per the partner’s configuration setting.
While we want to make our ads more useful through tailored audiences, we also want to provide simple and meaningful privacy choices to our users. Twitter users can simply uncheck the box next to “Promoted content” in their privacy settings, and Twitter will not match their account to information shared by ad partners to tailor ads for them. Additionally, because Twitter supports Do Not Track (DNT), Twitter does not match browser-related information to accounts of users who have DNT enabled to tailor ads for them. On mobile, Twitter also supports Limit Ad Tracking (iOS) and Opt out of interest-based ads (Android). For devices with this setting enabled, Twitter will not tailor ads by matching those devices to app information from ad partners.
In addition, Twitter takes various security measures to protect the transfer of information from ads partners to Twitter. For example, our partners whitelist Twitter’s IPs so that the data can be securely transferred to Twitter. Other security precautions include the blind hashing of list data. Hashing occurs automatically by default via the client browser when lists are being uploaded. Recommended browsers are Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
Have questions or feedback about something on this page?
Please log in to ads.twitter.com and file a support ticket using the Help? button in the top right corner of your ads dashboard.