Paid Social Audience Targeting: The Revolution Continues

Alex Jones 7 years ago

The ability to specifically target a brand’s ‘perfect customer’ at the precise point a purchasing decision is about to be made is marketing Nirvana.

That dream moved a step closer to being reality this month as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all unveiled exciting new ad products that promise to take targeting to whole new levels of precision.

In true Zazzle style we’ve spent hours looking at how this triage of new opportunities can feed into the wider content marketing and social mix and below we run through our initial findings. 

Twitter Partner Audiences

First up is Twitter’s exciting new Partner Audiences product.

This feature will enable advertisers to target Promoted Tweets to users who have shown purchase intent away from Twitter. Marketers will be able to select from over 1000 audiences, so they can target audiences like “coffee buyers” or luxury items at audiences earning a specific income.

Twitter have teamed with data giants Acxiom and Datalogix to create over 1,000 partner audiences that marketers can target, matching its users to people in the partner databases by using hashed email addresses associated with Twitter accounts.

In a blog post announcing the feature, Kyle Boston, a Product Manager for Revenue at Twitter writes:

“For example, by using a partner to provide the desired audience, an auto brand can connect with audiences that are in-market for a new car. A CPG company can reach customers that have previously purchased products in their category. And luxury brands can limit campaigns to shoppers who earn a household income above a certain threshold."

Twitter have been testing this feature with a few major brands recently, including Nestle, who, according the Twitter blog are happy with the results. Using the data through partner audiences, Nestle targeted buyers of peanut butter related products with their new Butterfinger Cup Minis.

There are huge opportunities to use this kind of data. Partner Audiences help to narrow down the target audience when promoting tweets, based on purchase behaviour as opposed to solely making assumptions based on interests. Targeting people who have actually purchased something will lead to much more effective advertising through the social network.

An health food brand, for instance, could use Partner Audiences to target people who actually purchase ‘Dairy-Free’ to promote a new product, with the knowledge that they are more likely to engage with it.

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This latest addition to Twitter’s advertising products Twitter’s is comparable to Facebook, who launched a similar feature 2 years ago, with the same data partners Acxiom and Datalogix as well as Epsilon.

While privacy will always remain a hot topic, Twitter users can opt out by going to privacy settings and unticking the box "Tailor ads based on information shared by ad partners."

The new feature is available now to marketers in the US and can be accessed through the behaviours section of the Twitter Ads Dashboard.

These features are currently only available to those advertising in the United States, and can be accessed by all those using Twitter advertising through the behaviours section of the Twitter Ads Dashboard. It will be interesting to see if similar functionality is made available in the UK in the future.

Facebook Topic Data

The big announcement from Facebook is the introduction of Topic Data. Partnering with leading social data platform, DataSift, Facebook will allow privacy safe access to its goldmine of status updates through its new insights product “Topic Data”.

In an announcement on the Facebook business blog the social network explains that

“Topic data shows marketers what audiences are saying on Facebook about events, brands, subjects and activities, all in a way that keeps personal information private. Marketers use the information from topic data to make better decisions about how they market on Facebook and other channels, and build product roadmaps.”

Facebook advertising has always led the way in terms of targeting options and audience insights, using the wealth of information that its users openly add to their personal profiles and pages that they like. Until now though, there has been no access to status updates, as much of Facebook’s data is private.

The topic data will be completely anonymized and aggregated in the same way that all other insights data is, so as not to disclose any information that could personally identify someone. Alongside this, topic data will not provide a result unless at least 100 different users match to protect privacy. Marketers won’t have access to specific users, or be able to target those based on mentions of certain terms, but they will be able to set ads to appear to people in similar demographics.

Examples given by Facebook for how marketers can use this new data include:

  • A fashion retailer can see the clothing items its target audience is talking about to decide which products to stock.
  • A brand can see how people are talking about their brand or industry to measure brand sentiment.

Access to this new data is available through undisclosed limited 3rd party analytics providers, working with DataSift to turn the data queries into meaningful insights for marketers.

We are looking to forward to testing out this new data to better understand audiences, both from an advertising perspective and to fuel our content strategy.

Instagram Clickable Carousel Ads

Instagram have never had clickable URLS, whether ads or not. Even when they introduced ads in October 2013, these have always been for branding and influence purposes.

The new update will, for the first time, allow clickable links when scrolling through your Instagram feed. Only available through their new product, multi-photo Carousel Ads, the ‘Learn More’ button will open up the URL in an internal browser, allowing users to easily get back to their photo feed.

This is a completely new advertising product from Instagram, which will allow marketers to add up to 4 branded images, which users can scroll through, alongside the ‘Learn More’ button. Clickable URLs will not be added to existing ad products, or organic Instagram posts.

In an announcement on the Instagram business blog: 

“One way to look at it is carousel ads bring the potential of multi-page print campaigns to mobile phones – with the added benefit of taking people to a website to learn more. For instance, a fashion company could use the carousel to deconstruct the individual products in a ‘look.’ A car company might share an array of different features of a vehicle and provide a link to learn more about the new model. Or, an advertiser could showcase how multiple ingredients come together to make a delicious meal.”

This balancing of user experience with demands of advertisers, who want to see more meaningful business results, is the latest update to advertising on Instagram, and may now make it more of a viable option to marketers looking to spend on the platform.

Social advertising is advancing as advertisers are looking for alternative options to reach their audience. The wealth of information that people share on social networks means the options for targeting the most relevant ads to the right people are huge. These recent updates from Facebook and Twitter provide marketers and strategists with new ways to capture data and insight, to not only advertise, but also to understand the audience and inform social and content strategies. The update from Instagram to include clickable URLs in some of its advertising products makes the photo-sharing platform an option for many more businesses.

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