Twitter is already a prominent social network, but its advertising program is still constantly evolving. The latest development is the introduction of “negative keyword targeting,” which is meant to help advertisers using Promoted Tweets avoid having their ads appear in search pages where they are contextually irrelevant.
In the example cited by Twitter, a company that sells bacon could use negative keyword targeting to ensure that its Promoted Tweets don’t appear when users search for actor Kevin Bacon, by simply adding “Kevin” as a negative keyword.
In addition to the negative keyword feature, Twitter also introduced different matching options when entering keywords, including exact match, phrase match, and basic keyword match, so that advertisers have more control over what types of search results where their Promoted Tweets might appear.
Twitter also introduced a feature that automatically matches Promoted Tweets with relevant trending topics in searches. Since trends can come about quickly and leave even faster, it isn’t always plausible for brand managers to go in and change keywords to align with popular trends, so this option allows Twitter to find trending topics that are relevant to your existing keywords and insert your Promoted Tweets into searches.
The photo above shows the advertising dashboard, where advertisers can add relevant keywords or phrases, choose the correct matching option, take advantage of the automatic trending topic matching feature, and add negative keywords to avoid.
All of these changes simply mean better targeting for brands using Promoted Tweets to gain a larger audience on Twitter. While the social site’s advertising options are still pretty simplistic when compared to giants like Facebook, improved targeting can certainly help brands reach more relevant users and make Twitter’s advertising products more attractive.
Promoted Tweets within Twitter search first debuted in 2010. Twitter also offers Promoted Tweets that appear in user timelines, but the new targeting options are mainly aimed at tweets that appear in search results. Twitter’s other advertising offers include Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts.
Ti Roberts
This is a great feature. It’s important to laser target your audience to get the best results in advertising. I’m sure this will post will be beneficial to our twitter advertisers. Thanks for sharing.
Ti
Martin Lindeskog
This is an interesting feature. Do you know if Google AdSense could do the same thing? Are they ads really contextual?
Peter P.
I might condsider these ads with twitter to promote some homes for sale. Hopefully with positive similar keyword searches.