Social Media Pay Per Click advertising can work really well for some businesses, and drive a lot of relevant traffic to their site. It is also a good way for your business to find new audiences that you may have not targeted before, therefore increasing your reach and sales. In this post we concentrate on the Twitter platform.
As much as Twitter Pay Per Click advertising works well for some, for others it doesn’t. If you’ve managed PPC campaigns in the past then you’ll know how easy it is to make common, silly mistakes. These costly Twitter PPC mistakes can be avoided.
In this post we talk about what these Twitter PPC mistakes are and how they can be avoided. As surely everyone’s number one goal should be to minimise the risk of costly mistakes as much as possible, as this can save you a lot of money and can also increase your ROI.
Twitter Campaign Types
This is very important and is something that every manager should decide on before going ahead and setting up a campaign. Like with most PPC platforms, Twitter offers you a variety of campaign types to choose from. We like to think of the campaigns as a choice of what we want to pay for. For example: You only pay when a user clicks on a link for a Website Clicks or Conversions campaign, you only pay for the first engagement on a Tweet Engagement campaign etc. There are also different features and optimisation methods that you can take advantage of for different campaign types as well.
You want to choose a campaign type that fits your goals. So if you want to drive traffic to your site then you would use a Website Clicks or Conversions campaign. If you wanted to increase your Following then you’d choose a Followers campaign. This is something that you need to get right from the off as you don’t want to be wasting money paying for the wrong action. We have noticed that a Tweet engagement campaign does report ‘clicks’ in the dashboard but the numbers are way off in Analytics. This is because ‘clicks’ mean a click anywhere, on your profile, image or even hashtags. So don’t be fooled and make sure you select the right campaign type for you.
Twitter Targeting
As with any other social PPC advertising platform, this is another important thing that every manager should decide on before going ahead with any campaign. You must ask yourself what your audience is and whether you can accurately target them on Twitter. This could be by targeting Followers of another account, keyword targeting, interest targeting etc. This applies to all. If your ads aren’t in front of the right audience then Twitter isn’t going to be a cost effective option for your business.
Similar Audiences on Twitter
If you decide to target by Followers Twitter automatically opts you into “Include followers of @Username”. This could have a detrimental effect on your campaign, if you’re trying to improve your presence and reach a new audience on Twitter then you don’t want to be wasting money on clicks/engagements from your own Following.
Also, Twitter opts you into ‘Expand reach by targeting similar users’ when you’re targeting by tailored audiences. Again this could have a negative impact on your campaign, if you only want your ads to show to a specific audience, your Twitter Pay Per Click ads will end up showing to a whole new audience.
Expanding your reach can be a very good thing and it can help improve your overall campaign’s performance, if you have specific goals that you want to meet then it could have a huge impact on how your ads perform and also cost you a lot in the process.
Twitter Bidding Options
Twitter automatically sets your bidding option to automatic. If you were to leave this then you will find that your average cost per action will be really high as it’s usually linked to the high estimated bid data they provide. This is something that a manager should always try to be in control of in Twitter as we’ve found that you don’t normally have to pay anywhere near what they predict. You can either select a maximum bid or a target bid instead of this. If you’ve got plenty of time on your hands then opt for maximum bid, then you’ll be able to optimise it more effectively, if you haven’t then we suggest you opt for target bid as it gives Twitter a slight amount of control on bidding.
Conclusion
These are all mistakes that you can avoid. Just by making sure your campaigns are all set up properly, your business can save a lot of money through wasted spend and help make Twitter a cost effective option. Feel free to comment any costly mistakes that you think should be in this post.
