Twitter Launches Ad Retargeting: “Tailored Audiences” Bring Retargeting To Mobile

Today Twitter announced the global roll-out of Tailored Audiences, the targeting capability the company began testing in beta in July. Tailored Audiences gives Twitter a retargeting product and more. As with Facebook, advertisers can use first party data to retarget their own site visitors, or tap into third party data to reach new custom audiences.

Twitter is launching Tailored Audiences with ten vendor partners: Adara, AdRoll, BlueKai, Chango, DataXu, Dstillery, Lotame, Quantcast, ValueClick, and [x+1]. Advertisers must work with one of those vendors to buy on the exchange.

Beta testers include HubSpot, which tested retargeting on Twitter with Promoted Tweets. According to Twitter, Hubspot saw a 45 percent lift in engagement from the retargeted ads compared to their prior campaigns on Twitter.

Delta airlines and Digitas also participated in the beta. While Digitas didn’t share any specifics about the campaign performance, Breanne Loso, media planner for Digitas, said in the announcement, “The ability to hone in on a very specific audience segment, such as recent flight searchers or recent flight bookers, and continue a conversation with them while on the go and within the social space is a fairly unique and powerful offering.”

Users can opt out of Tailored Audiences by unchecking the “Promoted content” box in their privacy settings. It also will honor Do Not track settings for users.

Target Audiences targeting is powered by browser cookies. Somewhat uniquely, Twitter can harvest a user’s desktop browser cookies when they log in to Twitter to inform the ads those users see when they log in to Twitter on their mobile phones. This is a key advantage Twitter has over other retartgeting exchanges, which are hampered by the fact that mobile browsers don’t support cookies.

The introduction of Tailored Audiences provides a big opportunity for Twitter to capture more ad revenue and compete for programmatic dollars. In addition to the mobile opportunities, marketers may also be more likely to test Twitter Tailored Audiences in light of the breakout success of Facebook’s retargeting and programmatic platform FBX.

To learn more about how to use Twitter Tailored Audiences, see 3 Ways Marketers Can #Win With Twitter’s New Tailored Audiences.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.