Testing Your Twitter Campaign
Like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter gives you a set of robust analytical tools so you can measure the response to your Promoted Accounts and Tweets. The features of Twitter’s analytics tools are:
Timeline Activity Dashboard: You can measure the activity of your Promoted Accounts and Tweets on a minute-by-minute basis. You can track how many impressions you’ve generated, how many retweets, how many clicks, how many replies, and how many follows your promotions have done.
Followers Dashboard: This useful dashboard gives you insight into your followers’ interests, geography, gender, level of engagement, etc.
Conversion Dashboard: Twitter has integrated conversion tags into their advertising platform, allowing you to track the activity of your Promoted Tweets all the way to conversion. You can track each click to your landing page, and which of those clicks converted to leads, transactions, or sales. This is very helpful in tracking your CPA on Twitter.
Again, Twitter controls the targeting process for Promoted Accounts and Tweets, and the scheduling of when those Promoted Products appear to Twitter users. So while you get great information from the analytics tools, you can’t really use that information to improve your Twitter marketing campaign, the way you can use analytics to improve your campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn. About the best you can do is to use the analytics tools to determine if Twitter advertising actually works for you.
You might run two or three test campaigns on Twitter to see how successful they are. If your campaign has a good conversion rate, and your Followers Dashboard shows that your Twitter ads are reaching the right demographics, you might continue using Twitter as an advertising venue. If you have a low conversion rate, and your ads don’t seem to be reaching the Twitter users whom you’d like to have as customers, you might want to think about using other online advertising venues.
The one aspect of Twitter marketing that you do have control over is your campaign budget. As always, set a significant budget (e.g., $1,000 per day for each ad) for the test campaign to truly test the effectiveness of your ads. Also, let the test campaign run for one week, so you have adequate time to monitor the response to each ad and to measure the collected data.