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About Tim Wilson

Tim Wilson works as content manager at HostPapa, a website hosting company serving over 100,000 customers around the world. Since launching in 2006, HostPapa has offered reliable, budget-friendly, easy-to-use web hosting solutions for small to medium-sized businesses.

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Twitter Adds Interest Based Ads

November 20, 2012 by Tim Wilson 2 Comments

Twitter Ads

Paid advertising on Twitter just got better, for both advertisers and Twitter’s over 140 million active monthly users. At the end of August 2012, Twitter announced that it was adding an interest-based advertising feature to the process of placing paid ads on their site.

Previously, Twitter advertisers could only disseminate ads to followers of the advertiser’s own Twitter account and to those whom Twitter’s own broad and highly generic “black box” algorithm deemed similar in interest. This had the effect of severely limiting the potential relevance and, therefore, effectiveness of any given ad.

But now, following an announcement on the Twitter Advertising Blog by Kevin Weil, Director of Product Management, interest based advertising (also known as “enhanced interest advertising”) empowers brands to target their ads to users with specific interests or to users with similar interests to a particular user.

Interest Based Advertising

Old style CocaCola van

Interest based advertising, just like it sounds, is a means for targeting Twitter ads to specific niche markets, making ads more relevant for viewers and, therefore, more effective for advertisers. A brand can now target both Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets according to over 350 interest-based criteria in categories like Education, Home & Garden, Investing, Music, Pets, Sports and Style & Fashion. Beneath each of these top tier categories are listed a bevy of related subcategories to help advertisers drill down their targeting even further.

In addition, advertisers can now create their own customized interest segments called, appropriately, Custom Segments, by simply suggesting specific user accounts (whether an individual or another business) with an overlapping or desired audience. This feature does not, however, let you simply target all the followers of any particular user. Rather, your ads go out to both those who follow and those who don’t follow selected users, based on Twitter’s own calculations of relevance and prospective interest.

To summarize: there are two components to the new interest based advertising feature on Twitter:

  1. The ability for advertisers to select from some 350 interests to better target their ads.
  2. The ability for advertisers to distribute their ads to an automatically generated list of users with similar interests to a specific user.

The opportunity to select these criteria is now incorporated seamlessly into the existing Twitter dashboard for advertisers, meaning you may have already encountered it without realizing it. Plus, as with every other part of the Twitter advertising process, the interface takes you step-by-step through using this new feature with wizard-like ease.

How it Works

Of course, if you’re already a Twitter user, you know that you didn’t have to select your interests into order to sign up for your account. So how, then, does Twitter match the interest related criteria selected by advertisers to the actual interests of actual Twitter users? The answer is through an algorithm that Twitter has devised for extrapolating the users’ interests based on several criteria:

  • The content of their public Tweets
  • The items they Retweet or Comment on
  • The other Twitter accounts a user Follows

Users already benefit from the results of this algorithm in the “# Discover” tab of their Twitter account, which is used to find Tweets and Stories of likely relevant, targeted interest to read. Users also engage this algorithm when using Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature to find other possible Twitter members of interest to Follow. Now, Twitter advertisers can make use of this same algorithm to direct their ads to the most targeted, potentially interested Twitter members.

The Ads

Paid ads on Twitter look just like other Tweets posted by regular users and in fact are listed in a user’s Twitter feed right along with all the other non-promotional Tweets that appear there.

This is all the more reason to be aware that better targeting of your ads does not supplant the need to produce compelling ads. No matter how finely tuned your targeting, a Twitter user will still only be interested in your ad if it speaks to them. Therefore, it’s still as important as ever to learn how to craft the perfect Twitter ads and, since the shape of perfection changes over time, learn how to track, analyze and adapt your Twitter ads accordingly.

The other, more hidden, benefit of perfecting your copy is that great copy can help compensate for lower bid rates on the competitive scale. That’s because Twitter determines the relative value of a Promoted Tweet not only by the bid that the advertiser makes for placing that ad, but the engagement rate among users who view that ad.

So, if an ad generates extensive (and intensive) engagement with Twitter users, it will get increasingly greater visibility, even if its advertiser hasn’t necessarily placed the most competitive bid. This is because Twitter benefits from keeping its users engaged just as much as, if not more than, it benefits from receiving a higher rate per impression. Read that again: It serves Twitter’s own needs to deliver great content, even when it’s occasionally at the expense of potentially greater per-impression earnings. Basically, it pays to create Promoted Tweets that look like organic Tweets and not advertisements, which users more often tend to skip over.

The goal for advertisers of this combination of the lowered bid minimum and enhanced interest advertising is increased ROI on every Twitter ad campaign. According to Reuters, 1-3% of Twitter users who view a Promoted Tweet will click onto it, but recent beta testing on paid ads distributed using Twitter’s new enhanced interest ad features increases that engagement rate.

Minimum Bid Change

There’s another change for Twitter advertisers taking place at the same time as this introduction of interest-based advertising: a reduction in the minimum allowable bid per impression. While the bidding process for Twitter’s paid ads remains the same, as do the social media giant’s auction mechanisms, the minimum bid has been graciously reduced from $0.50 to $0.01, bringing Twitter’s minimum prices for paid advertising more in line with the rest of the social media advertising platforms.

The Lowdown

Twitter is obviously continuing to refine its offerings for advertisers. In July, the web’s first and most popular microblogging service transformed how advertisers could place Promoted Tweets, deciding that they could place paid promoted Tweets right away, without first having to post it as a standard public Tweet visible to all of the advertiser’s followers. The only targeting enabled then was quite basic: letting advertisers select specific geographic regions and desktop/laptop versus mobile ad targeting, for example.

And speaking of geographic and mobile ad targeting, on September 12, 2012, Twitter announced improvements to its geo-targeting for marketers, or what it now calls “enhanced geo-targeting, including the addition of regional targeting to specific areas in Japan and the U.K. While back in May of 2012, Twitter also made Promoted Tweets with basic targeting abilities available for promotion on its Mobile site. (Incidentally, in a recent report, Twitter announced that of its active users, 55% access the site through a mobile device). This allowed Twitter advertisers to target ads not only to mobile devices in general, but to those running on certain operating systems (e.g. iOS, Android, Blackberry, or other).

With these changes alone, The Washington Post recently reported tripling its success with Promoted Tweets. Now that kind of success just got another… or two other extra boons: with interest-based advertising and a lowering of the minimum bid to just a penny.

Photo Credit: Flickr

How Google Tag Manager Helps Development Teams Out of Big Headaches

November 8, 2012 by Tim Wilson Leave a Comment

 

Photo Credit: Flickr

Overloaded website coding scripts, analytical tracking codes and image tags can add undue headaches to content and programming development teams, the very reason why such an innovative tool like Google Tag Manager was invented. Digital marketing improvements such as this were highly needed, and couldn’t have come at any better time. This free tool available through your Webmaster Tools account can simplify all of your coding needs in one place without having to type 10 thousand different tags, or snippets, which control your accounts. Instead, you can have everything done with one simple line of code, and it’s all because Google loves the programmers of the world, and even allows you to include tracking codes from their competition.

Features Provided Within GTM

If it comes from Google, it’s gotta be special; the Google Tag manager literally offers dozens of speciality features which also expand outside of Google tags like Adsense and Analytics. Aside from controlling the firing sequence of these tags, this innovative managerial tool offers:

  • Support for any marketing measurement tag available across the galaxy
  • Code-breaking warnings that allow for easy fixes in debugging mode
  • Easy monitoring and managing of all tags
  • Ability to create customized rules for each tag so proper information is collected every time
  • Ability to blacklist specific tags which should never appear in code
  • Coming soon: A/B tag testing and in-depth firing reports

With proprietary focuses of marketing departments already tied up with proper message delivery and harnessing the right traffic, worrying about constantly adding or correcting site tags placed in blogs or business sites shouldn’t have to be part of the marketing department as well. With onboard help and plenty of videos describing how to use Tag Manager, empowerment becomes even stronger for the marketing professional, taking the focus off web intricacies like tag placements and asynchronous firing techniques which are better left for the programming gurus to finagle with.

How It Helps with Developer Nightmares

Since GTM has many different toys from all programming girls and boys to test and manage, we’ve been approached with one major question, and with merit: how does Google Tag Manager help with development headaches often encountered by programmers? We researched this quandary and have intuitively compiled your solutions below.

Reason #1: It’s the Time Saving Tool of the Decade

Although you must create new Google account access for this Tag Manager tool, you’ll never need to go back and forth with code again. By simply taking all pieces of tracking data from all sources (yes, Bing, too) and pasting it into the Tag container, you now have one line of code to append to website pages. This is an immense time-saving feature which prevents going back and forth from one place to another. Should you need more containers, that’s handled right from your Tag Manager toolbox.

Reason #2: More Secure than Separate Tags

Since data control would have been insecurity #1 for programmers and website owners, Google Tag Manager decided to append an intuitive debugging console along with preview modes before launching the tag containers. Coupled with user permission enabling and revision history recording, anyone worried about tag security can sleep soundly knowing that the ‘one and done’ tag tool comes complete with numerous layers of indemnity.

Reason #3: Even Not-so-Savvy Can Use

Those who are better at being marketing ninjas as opposed to programming websites can take solace in the ease of implementing this tagging feature. Anyone who can open an Analytics account or have access to tracking codes can use this intuitive feature without issue, the very reason why Google invented this tool. From there, you simply apply the code where your WordPress theme file tells you to, follow online instructions widely available, or hand to your programmer when ready.

Reason #4: Google Wants You to Succeed

Yes, it may sound strange, but marketing professionals are dearly loved by Google so much so that they’ve gone out of their way to create wonderful marketing tools to deeply assist the professional marketer in promoting their business using the easiest tools and methods possible. How do tags assist the marketing pro? By having correctly written code which GTM provides, marketing gurus will have better analytical data recorded for segmenting campaigns through proper channels.

Google is expected to surpass Facebook in online display ads soon, if it hasn’t done so already. While people who want their businesses to be widely seen will go through exponentially hard tribulations in propagating the best marketing campaigns, Google definitely eases the burden with these new sets of tagging tools available to everyone who is able to get Google access.

So, Why Choose Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager screen

Photo Credit: Flickr

Since we’ve discussed how the headaches can subside by choosing tag manager, let’s cover why anyone would even consider using another tag tool when there are several billion already in existence—even WordPress has tag containers for multiple coding implementations. You’d be surprised what the consensus believes and what Google thinks about your marketing efforts when using GTM.

Rules and Macros

Doesn’t it irk webmasters when placing code snippets into blogs or websites and things aren’t firing correctly, or out of sequence? Well, macros and rule setting was enacted for this very reason; webmasters have the capacity for implementing code snippets with macros so everything happens when it’s supposed to happen and collects the perfect data snapshots when it should, which is excellent for marketing traceability. Add the additional tag checks for code breaking and you’ll retain complete control over everything your website’s tracking code is meant to do.

Tag Manager Empowers the Development Agency

Those programmers who operate agencies will find GTM particularly advantageous since they can easily handle multiple accounts quickly through Tag Manager. This allows multiple websites to each have their own tracking measurements while the agency can easily trace all happenings of individual account holders. Pretty snazzy for agencies and developers alike, if we don’t say so ourselves.

Makes Usability Useful Again

Many excellent usability features were packed into Tag Manager especially for IT professionals who have concerns relevant to usefulness. Some of the professional tools which promote usability include:

  • Version history shows each edit that was made on given sites.
  • Site tag view allows the webmasters to view every tag existing within an individual container.
  • Debugging console is available to work out kinks before putting live.
  • Tag firing rules allow URL-based, event-based and referral-based firing options to be set which promotes even deeper analytical data tracking measures.
  • Custom tags for images, Java and HTML are currently supported with other types coming in next version.

Conclusion

Solving the problem of making tags easier to maintain, especially across numerous websites, has finally been accomplished. Although Google is working out minor bugs while rolling out additional features, the Google Tag Manager allows the developer to approach their website programming and tracking protocols holistically while having the ability to set firing rules asynchronously. Expect even better implementations to be introduced when our programming world turns the 2013 corner. Until then, webmasters can now concentrate on developing content, developers can concentrate on easier programming and marketing professionals can finally receive accurate data analytics thanks to Google Tag Manager.

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