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Twitter mobile app promotion is a full suite of products that enables advertisers to efficiently drive installs of their mobile app and re-engage existing users. With mobile app promotion, advertisers can drive users to download or open mobile apps directly from within a Tweet. Combined with Twitter’s sophisticated targeting capabilities, a creative suite optimized for mobile app promotion, and the ability to track to the install level, these products are designed to empower you in the mobile marketplace.

In addition to these powerful new tools, Twitter mobile app promotion campaigns are built to work on a cost per app click pricing system. This ensures will only pay for clicks that lead to the App Store or Google Play, or to open the app.

Twitter Ads are priced using an auction-based system. There is no set price for the engagements and conversions you acquire. Rather, during the campaign setup process you will specify an amount you are aiming to pay for each action acquired through that campaign. This amount is your bid. When you run an app installs or app engagement campaign, you will only be charged for clicks to install or open your app you acquire from that campaign, or only on installs of your app if you choose that bidding option. All other actions and engagements (impressions, replies and retweets for example) are free.

There are three different bidding options when running a mobile app install campaign:

• Cost per app click bidding (CPAC) enables you to bid on app clicks. App clicks are clicks that lead to the app store or directly into the app and you are only charged when a user takes that action. With this bidding option, our platform will optimize to drive as many app clicks as possible (and as many high-value app clicks as possible). The daily average CPC will be at or below your stated target. We guarantee we won't ever charge you more than 20% of your target bid over the course of the campaign.

• Optimized action bidding (OAB) is similar, but enables you to bid on the install rather than the app click. While you’re only charged on an app click, your Max Bid value represents the absolute max amount you would pay for an install. With this option, you will never be charged more than your bid and advertisers are often charged less.

• Cost per install bidding (CPI) takes this idea one step further, and allows you to bid and pay for the app install, ensuring that you only pay when Twitter drives an install. With this option, you will never be charged more than your bid and advertisers are often charged less.

Note: OAB and CPI bidding require mobile app conversion tracking and are only available for app install campaigns. For more information about tracking conversions for your app, please refer to this article.

When setting bids, it is important to think carefully about the value each campaign action brings to your business and to bid at least this amount. The recommended bid is a good indicator of the amount you will need to bid for your campaign to reach its goal. If your bid is not competitive relative to other advertisers, your campaign may not serve.

One thing to keep in mind when driving app installs is balancing cost efficiency with scale. While cost per app click bidding allows you to optimize for scale, optimized action bidding and cost per install bidding supplement that scale, giving you multiple ways to further control your budget when driving app installs. We recommend testing the different bidding types to see which model yields the best result for your business. Keep in mind if you start using OAB or CPI bidding, it is recommended you bid higher than your CPAC bids.

In addition to controlling the amount you pay through bidding, you also have complete control over the amount you spend overall. After setting your bid, you are prompted to enter a total budget for the campaign and, optionally, a daily budget as well. When your overall budget is reached, your campaign will stop serving until you increase the budget. When your daily budget is reached, your campaign will stop serving until the next day. When your overall budget is reached, your campaign will stop serving until you increase the budget.

First, log in to your Twitter Ads account. If you have yet to set up your first campaign, you will be prompted to choose a campaign type right away. If you have one or more existing campaigns, click the blue “Create new campaign” button on the main campaign dashboard.

Choose the App installs or engagements option from the campaign picker.

Creating a campaign with the new app promotion campaign option is simple.

The first option is to choose how you want to optimize the campaign. If you choose “Reach people without my app installed,” Twitter will show your ad to users more likely to install your app. If you choose “Reach people with my app installed,” Twitter will show your ad to users more likely to engage with your app.  When you apply these selections, Twitter uses information about its users to make a determination of whether or not a user is likely to have installed your app.  This feature does not replace tailored audience targeting which can be a more accurate method to target these audiences.  Read here for more information on tailored audience targeting.

The next choice is the selection of a single app and platform (for example “Great Coffee App for iPhone” or “Google Sheets for Android”) to be promoted in your campaign. The mobile targeting on your campaign will automatically match to the platform of the app you select. For example, if you select an Android app the campaign will automatically be targeted to only Android devices. The app selection possibilities in the drop-down are drawn from any App Cards you have created.

If you have not created any App Cards yet, or you want to add an app card directly from this campaign setup form, click “Add new app” and enter the app ID along with the country the app is available. If the app is available in the United States, leave the selection as United States. If it is not, select a country where the app is available to verify your app.  For more information on this, please see the card setup page here.

After you select the app you will be promoting, the next set of options is for the “Creative” section where you can create or select tweets to add to the campaign. Image App Cards can be created within the campaign setup flow. If you would like to create a basic app card, go to the “Cards” section of the UI under the “Creatives” tab at the top of your toolbar. Instructions for setting up App Cards can be seen here.

Please see the diagram of sections for Creative in the screenshot below:

1. If you would like to create a new tweet to go along with the app you selected, section 1 is where you input the tweet copy.
2. The section with number 2 allows you to select any image App Cards you have created previously. The image app card you select or create here will be attached to your tweet copy.
3. You can skip sections 1 & 2 via section 3, if you would like to select existing Tweets to Promote in the app campaign. The Tweets that will be available to promote here are any tweets that have the app you have decided to promote.

After you have created or selected the Tweets that you want to promote with your app campaign, the rest of the campaign setup is the standard Promoted Tweet campaign setup. Please follow that link for any setup questions around targeting. Your targeting options will be as shown below.

As mentioned earlier, the only difference in the targeting between a Promoted Tweet campaign and an App campaign is that your device targeting is automatically selected. For example, if we selected an app for the iPhone earlier, the targeting will automatically be iOS devices:

Choose where your promoted Tweets will show

By default for new campaigns, your tweets will serve to Twitter user timelines, user profiles, tweet detail pages and on the Twitter Audience Platform. To modify this, uncheck the “Expand your reach on the Twitter Audience Platform” section of the campaign form.

Save your campaign and you are now promoting your app!

The measurement capabilities of mobile app promotion allow you to view your mobile app card engagement and conversion metrics and optimize towards cost-efficiency and return on investment. Upon promotion with Twitter ads, app card performance on Tweet clicks and engagements is immediately available for analysis and optimization within the campaign dashboard.

In addition, advertisers wishing to track down to the install level can do so by setting up conversion tracking for mobile apps. This enables measurement of the number of users that perform a desired action after viewing or engaging with your Twitter ads. It provides the capability to measure which campaigns drive app events such as installs or app opens.

To track down to the app install or reopen level, advertisers must integrate with one of Twitter’s chosen mobile measurement partners. App measurement is typically done via a tracking SDK, which is a code package that is installed in your mobile app. The tracking SDK enables you to measure events related to app installs.

Set up your app to track app installs and events with Twitter’s system through the mobile measurement partner UI by specifying which apps and events you want enabled for conversion tracking. Once this is complete, the SDK in your app will send the Twitter ads system conversion events. The Twitter ads system then does conversion attribution on those conversions based on the attribution window you set. Both post-engagement and post-view attribution are available on Twitter. You can select attribution windows for each (e.g. 1, 7, 14, 30, 90 days). If you are tracking through a mobile measurement partner, please attempt to match up the Twitter attribution window settings with your mobile measurement partner attribution settings.

Our mobile measurement options are:

• Adbrix
• Adjust
• AppsFlyer
• Apsalar
• Kochava
• Localytics
• Tune
• Yahoo! Japan

The other new feature related to creating app campaigns is a change in reporting. You will be able to filter and view any campaigns you create through the app promotion campaign flow in the reporting.

What are the App click, App click rate, and eCPAC labels?

Twitter is featuring cost per app click charging on app promotion campaigns.  ”This enables you to be charged for clicks that lead the user (1) to the App Store or Google Play or (2) to open your app.” Here are the definitions of each of the labels (which also appear in the .csv downloads) for the reporting:  

App click: For campaigns set up through the app campaign setup flow, reporting will be on “App clicks.” The definition of an “app click” is the engagement that leads directly to the App Store or Google Play (App install) OR into the app (App engagement)

App click rate: “App click rate” is defined as “App clicks / Impressions”

eCPAC:  is defined as Effective Cost Per App Click, has replaced eCPE for app campaigns.  eCPAC accounts for additional app clicks tied to the advertiser’s Promoted Tweet campaign that they are not billed for.  
 

Conversion Reporting

Twitter provides conversion tracking for mobile apps, which allows you to measure the full conversion impact of your campaigns, including initial installs and in-app conversion events. We have partnered with leading companies in mobile measurement as well as providing a free Twitter-developed solution called Answers by Crashlytics to help you see how engagements and impressions on Twitter drive your app conversions. To read more about these mobile measurement options, please refer to the Measurement & Optimization section above.

If you're receiving a warning stating "This is not a valid App Store URL or ID", note that Twitter uses a vendor to validate App Store entries and it can take 2-4 days for the information to be passed to Twitter servers. If it has been more than 4 days, you can let us know by visiting ads.twitter.com and clicking on the "Help?" button to file a support ticket.