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Before getting started, think about your company’s mission. Understanding what you stand for will help you create consistent and meaningful campaigns that feel authentic.

• Create a value proposition: Clearly stating how you differ from your competitors and how you can benefit your customers will help you understand who to target and how to position your product.
• Set an objective: Do you want to drive more people to your website? Drive more sales? Encourage people to install your app? Identifying your goals at the outset will help you choose the right campaign. Every great campaign starts with a strategy. Please visit this page for more information on how to use ads for different business objectives.
• Define your metrics for success: These should align with your objective. Be specific! If your goal is to drive website traffic, are you focusing on a percentage increase in traffic, or a target cost per click (CPC) for each visit?
• Get organized: Plan your advertising budget, understand your developer resources and craft a design plan.

Tip: As a starting point, advertisers may find it useful to observe the performance of organic Tweets, and take the highest performing organic Tweets to add to campaigns.

When optimizing your campaigns, there are 3 main levers you can pull: Creative, Targeting, and Bid/Budget.
 

Creative

• Be transparent and clear about what you’re offering, what your product is, and what users can gain by engaging with your ad.
• Have a strong call to action that clearly explains what the user can expect by engaging with your ad.
• Convey a sense of urgency. Why should users visit your site now? Is there a limited time offer?
• Include some sort of rich media - try using relevant and engaging images for more compelling creatives. You can also use the creative cards that align with each campaign objective (i.e. website cards with your website clicks campaign, lead gen cards with your lead gen campaign, etc).

Ask a question in your Tweet copy - it helps users feel like they’re part of a conversation and can compel them to engage with your ad.
 

Targeting

Tightly targeted campaigns tend to perform better. If you don’t implement any targeting, you are eligible to target every user on Twitter. This may not be ideal because your ad will not be relevant to every user. The auction takes into account relevancy and quality of ad when deciding which ad will be served. If your ad is not relevant to users, your ad will likely not be served, or it will be served at a more expensive bid. Even if it is served, it may not lead to the engagement you want. Implementing targeting features and keeping your targeting narrow, you have a higher chance to serve to audiences that are relevant to your ad and more likely to engage. Some tips for targeting are below:

• Increase reach: target users who are similar to your followers, target users who are Tweeting with specific keywords, and target users who have visited your website (tailored audiences).
• Align Tweet copy with targeting: For example, if you have one Tweet copy targeting males, and one targeting females, make sure the copy you use aligns with the different targeting parameters.
• Break out mobile vs. desktop targeting: Mobile is a fundamentally different medium than desktop, characterized by frequent quick sessions and spur-of-the-moment spikes in purchase intent. And conversion rates may differ on mobile vs. desktop. Because of these differences, we recommend running separate campaigns on mobile and desktop. This will let you test and learn the nuanced user behaviors in each medium, with full ability to make campaign changes specific to each medium, such as creative or bid changes. Mobile vs. desktop should be your first split in all of your split tests. You may want to further break out mobile to phone vs. tablet.
• Do not target the same users in multiple campaigns: Performance can suffer because you are essentially competing against yourself.
• TEST TEST TEST: One of the most important things you can do to drive continued campaign performance is to optimize and test your campaigns. While it makes sense to run always-on campaigns, you’ll want to continually refresh and optimize your campaigns, given Twitter’s ever-changing, real-time nature. Use your campaigns to identify winners and under-performers, and:

1. Pause campaigns that are significantly under-performing.
2. Modify bids for campaigns close to, but not quite meeting, your goals.
3. Increase bids for campaigns that are driving performance and could benefit from scale.
4. Remove low performing keywords, interests, handles, etc., and replace them with ones that are similar to the high performing ones.
5. Analyze conversions by targeting types: i.e. are there any @usernames or keywords that are driving spend but not driving conversions? Remove those from campaigns.
6. Look at Tweet-level conversions and increase bids for Tweets that are driving conversions. Decrease bids or remove any Tweets that are performing poorly.
7. Look at device-specific conversion data and adjust your bids accordingly.
    

Bid/Budget

Your bid and budget come into play when controlling the spend in your campaign. Twitter Ads is an auction based system, so your budget and bid determine the price of your campaign. There is no minimum for using Twitter Ads and our system will only charge advertisers when you acquire an action (based on your campaign objective). While we cannot provide an exact price for the cost of Twitter Ads, since this is based on your budget and bid, you can take certain steps (outlined below) to get an idea of how much you will end up paying. It’s important to note that advertisers are never charged for organic activity.
 

Bidding

• Bid: The maximum amount you’re willing to spend per action. You may pay up to this amount each time an action occurs, but you will likely pay less.
• Your bid is one of the factors that determines how frequently your ad is displayed. The higher you bid, the more likely your ads will show on Twitter. For new advertisers, we suggest you start with the recommended bid or our automatic bidding function (auto bid). Set your bid based on the value you place on each new engagement. Your bid will determine how well your campaign performs, and your average cost per engagement. Even if you set a high maximum bid, you’ll only pay slightly more than the second highest bidder.
• Note: You may have to increase your bid for more competitive targeting. For example, advertisers targeting specific geographic regions may need to bid more to win the same amount of auctions as advertisers targeting less specific geographic regions.
   

Budget

• When you create a campaign or click into a campaign to edit it, a suggested bid will appear next to the maximum bid once you enter a campaign budget, daily budget, and campaign start/end dates. Set your total budget and your daily budget. Each day, you will never spend over your daily budget. Similarly, you will never spend over your total budget for the whole campaign.
   

Strategy

• Think strategically when setting your bid and budget, especially if you’re starting new campaigns. With a small budget, it’s easy to set your bid and budgets very low. However, this makes it difficult to serve your ads, and the engagements you receive may not be the audience you were hoping to reach. This may cause you to have very little data, or skewed data, and it will be increasingly difficult to optimize your campaigns based off of the data you’ve accumulated.
• The most efficient way to maximize a limited budget would be to use the suggested bid or autobid, set the daily budget high enough for the campaign to be able to run and accumulate data, and see what this data tells you. You’ll be able to see what your average cost per action is, when you’re serving the most, what kinds of engagement you’re receiving, etc. You can then edit your bid and budget parameters from there, using data to guide your decisions.
• For more information, please see our Bidding and Auctions FAQ.