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Intro to campaign optimization

Optimizing your campaign means setting it up for success, and maximizing the chances it has of winning auctions, serving impressions, and receiving user engagement.  

Because of Twitter’s real-time nature, testing different tweets and targeting criteria is the best way to find out what works best for your business and individual audience. This page will offer tips and strategies for your campaigns to drive results.

Top Tips:

• Replace under-performing tweets and targeting with fresh alternatives.
• Pause campaigns that are under-performing.
• Modify bids for campaigns that are doing well and merit a higher spend, or that are close to but not quite achieving as they should.
• Analyze your device-specific conversion data and adjust your bids accordingly.

Creatives and Tweets

‘Ad quality’ is a major factor taken into account by our auction algorithm when determining which tweets will serve. Follow these tips to ensure your tweets are set up for success.

• Have multiple tweets in your campaigns. By adding multiple Promoted Tweets and varying the creative (i.e. using a Card, image + URL in Tweet copy, just Tweet copy + URL, etc), you allow the algorithm to have more ads to choose from when determining your best performing ad.
• Refresh your creatives often. Twitter is What’s Happening, so staying up to date with new, relevant content increases your chances of successful serve. If your campaign isn’t serving as many impressions as you’d like, try swapping out its tweets for fresh ones.
• Be transparent and clear.  Being clear about you’re offering, what your product is, and what users can gain by engaging with your ad increases likelihood of user engagement.
• Include rich, engaging media. Try using engaging images and videos for more compelling promoted tweets.
• Ask a question.  Twitter is great for starting conversations. Asking your users a question in your promoted tweet will help users feel part of a conversation and can compel them to engage with your ad.
• Play to your objective. Twitter has a variety of specialized Ads Cards, that can and should be used within the relevant campaign objective. For example, app cards within App Install campaigns, and website cards within Website Clicks and Conversions objective.

Learn more about setting up your content strategy here.

Targeting

Twitter Ads offers diverse targeting options, meaning you can reach the market segments that matter to you. We advise running multiple campaigns at once to optimize your Twitter Ads performance.

While it’s always smart to target by location and device, we advise using only one type of audience targeting with each campaign. In other words, choose whether to target by keyword, interest, followers, behavior, and so on. This makes it much easier to track what works and optimize accordingly.

Other targeting tips to optimize your campaigns:

• Target with focus. Creating campaigns with focused, relevant targeting means you have a higher chance to serve to audiences who are interested and likely to engage with your ad. Too large an audience will decrease the chances of the ad being relevant to users. That being said, targeting too small an audience will limit the users who are eligible to see your ad. Use the campaign forecaster tool within the campaign setup form to see if your targeting parameters are focused but not limited.
• Increase your 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).
• Vary your targeting between campaigns. If you have more than one campaign targeting very similar users performance can suffer, as your campaigns are essentially competing between each other for serve.
• 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. Because of this, we recommend running separate campaigns each targeting mobile and desktop seperately. This will let you test and learn the nuanced user behaviors for each.
• Play around. One of the most important things you can do to drive continued campaign performance is to test what works for you and 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. Remove low performing keywords, interests, handles, etc., and replace them with ones that are similar to the high performing ones.

Have more questions about targeting? Visit our detailed Q&As on: Device targeting | Geo, gender, and language targeting | Interest, and follower targeting | Keyword targeting | Tailored Audiences

Bid and Budget

There is no minimum budget for Twitter Ads, but setting competitive bids and budgets within your campaigns allows them to win auctions and serve to users. Using these tips will help you set a bid and budget that maximizes your campaign results within your price range:

• Utilize auto bid. Your bid is one of the factors that determines how frequently your ad is displayed. For new advertisers, we suggest you start with the recommended bid or our automatic bidding function (auto bid). This will ensure your bid is competitive within the auction and gain serve, and will auto fit to your campaign budget.
• Set your bid based on the value you place on each new engagement. Your bid factors into how well your campaign performs, so putting thought into how much a user’s engagement means to your business is recommended. With a small budget it’s easy to set a low bid, but remember, even if you set a high maximum bid, you’ll only pay slightly more than the second highest bidder.
• Match bid to targeting size. If your campaigns are targeting very specific audiences, you may have to increase your bid in order to serve. For example, advertisers targeting specific geographic regions may need to bid more to win the same number of auctions as advertisers targeting less specific audiences, as there are less users in that audience.

Find more information on bids and budgeting in our Bidding and Auctions FAQ.

Want more tips? You can find optimization tips specific to our unique campaign objectives here: Website Clicks and Conversions | App Install or Re-Engagement | Followers