Twitter rolls out performance-based tool charging SMBs based on clicks, installs, or leads

Barry Collins, director SMB, EMEA at Twitter told The Drum it had focused on increasing its capabilities and functionalities on Twitter Ads over the past eight months.

“We felt the rate of innovation was fantastic but we needed to align that to advertisers and how they are thinking rather than just presenting all of our innovations to them and asking them figure it out,” he said.

Collins explained that the majority of SMB marketers on Twitter have smaller budgets and are simply interested in direct response.

“For every pound they spend they want to know the return,” he said. “Knowing that’s the way they think we’ve tried to change or enhance our ad product to objective-based campaigns."

The tool, built into the Twitter Ad platform, allows SMB marketers to select from a range of key objectives, including driving followers, website clicks or conversions, tweet engagements, app installs or engagements, or leads.

Twitter then recommends the best ad format and has offered more tools, such as an image cropper with drag-and-drop capability, to make it easier to customise ads.

To help marketers generate better ROI, they will only pay when a user takes an action aligned with the brand’s campaign objective.

“You’ll get more of what you want. Because you’re only paying for a specific type of engagement we believe that you’ll get more for your investment,” said Collins on the pricing model.

Reports will also display metrics that are most relevant to the campaign goals.

Collins said that it will be initially offered to SMBs, but will roll out to larger brand advertisers in the coming months.

The move comes a week after Twitter’s second quarter earnings report which saw the social network report an £86m loss but a surge in advertising revenue to $277m.

However, Forrester analyst Anthony Mullens claimed its own research suggested only 44 per cent of marketers were satisfied with Twitter as a platform, and that 50 per cent were not confident they could measure their marketing efforts on the site.

“It could probably provide more guidance and education, supporting marketers a bit more,” he said at the time.

Collins agreed that marketers are still in need of assistance when it comes to capitalising their use of Twitter. “Yes, they still need a lot of guidance and education. We have a vast amount of capabilities on Twitter from marketers who are really advanced to those just starting out. We recognise that but we have a range of educational services for all of those people."

He added that this is part of an ongoing evolution of its suite of advertsing products.

The new tool is available from today, (7 July), via the Twitter Ads website.