Twitter Launches Innovative Retargeted Ads Product

Twitter recently launched an innovative new product to allow advertisers to display retargeted ads to users every time that they log into their account.  An initial experimental phase of this new “Tailored Audiences” software was started in July, and has subsequently been fine tuned and fully implemented into the system.

In the past, software developers have been unable to utilize retargeting techniques on mobile devices because these products typically use cookies to identify which websites the user has recently visited.  Mobile devices do not generally use cookies, but Twitter has found an ingenious way around this problem.  With the new “Tailored Audiences” product, when a user logs into their Twitter account from a laptop or desktop computer, their web browser cookies will be stored in their account.  Once this information has been captured, the cookies from the computer will be utilized to create retargeted ads on mobile devices that subsequently log into the Twitter account.

Twitter’s new product is now available globally to all advertisers, allowing them to target users who have recently visited their websites with retargeted Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets.  Considering the fact that 70% of Twitter’s ad revenue comes from mobile devices, the ability for the product to take cookies from other computers and utilize them during mobile logins is a massive leap in the usability and effectiveness of this tool.

Some concerns have been raised in the past about retargeted ads, with privacy issues coming to the forefront of these questions.  However, due to the fact that activity on Twitter is generally all in the public realm, the concerns over the new “Tailored Audiences” product are less prevalent.  Additionally, Twitter provides a “do not track” option for those users who would prefer not to see Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts based on what websites they have visited.

This new product is the latest move in Twitter’s development to become a major player in the advertising world.  With a share price of $43.69 based on a $23.8 billion valuation, this new retargeting initiative is an essential step towards success.  Twitter purchased MoPub, the mobile ad network, for $350 million in September, so clearly an increase in advertising control is a top priority.  The company has also allowed advertisers to utilize “keyword targeting” to display specific ads to users based on words that they have tweeted.

The great minds at Twitter know that advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money if you can offer them users who are already primed to be interested in purchasing their products, and the new “Tailored Audiences” software is a powerful step in this direction.  Clearly, displaying an advertisement to a user who has recently been looking at a company’s website is far more likely to lead to a sale than simply displaying advertisements to people who haven’t shown any particular interest.  Twitter’s new initiative has created an exciting buzz throughout the advertising world, and only time will show just how effective it will be.  Would you be willing to pay more in advertising costs if you knew that your ads would be shown to users who have recently visited your website?