Twitter Updates Audience Insights & Introduces Persona Targeting

Twitter today announced an update to its audience insights dashboard and introduced a streamlined way for advertisers to target demographic groups.

Launched in late May, the audience insights dashboard provides a snapshot of Twitter user demographics, such as income, interests and purchasing behavior. Today’s update enables brands to apply those demographics specifically to their ad campaigns and tailored audiences. The demographic information is aggregated from Twitter data partners Datalogix and Acxiom, and displayed without personally identifying any individual users.

Twitter product manager Andrew Bragdon explained more about campaign insights in a blog post:

Campaign insights help you better understand who you’re reaching with your ad campaigns. Within your campaign dashboard, you can simply click “View audience insights” to learn more about your paid audience, and then use this information to optimize your targeting and ad content.

You can also easily compare insights between your reached and engaged audiences. Your reached audience are users who are viewing your campaign; your engaged audience includes users who are actively engaging (replying, favoriting and Retweeting) with your ads.

If you have conversion tracking enabled, campaign insights will tell you more about the users who have converted in the past. You can even compare insights between your reached and converted audiences to identify new ways to connect with an audience that is most likely to convert.

Persona Filters Simplify Targeting

Twitter has also added a new “persona” filtering feature within the insights dashboard. Personas offer shorthand categories of audiences, including parents, millennials, small businesses, college graduates and business decision-makers. Advertisers can target the categories directly from the dashboard — one click takes you into the ad campaign creation tool with the selected targeting demographic already applied.

“You also have the option to add additional targeting types to refine your audience,” Bragdon wrote. “For example, if you want to reach millennials who are using iOS, you can simply select “millennials,” and then choose “iOS” as a mobile platform to discover more about this specific group of users.”

The campaign and tailor insights features are now available globally to all Twitter advertisers. Access to personas are limited to the United States for now.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.