Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms with more than 350 million users and Tweets are also visible to more than 500 million internet users monthly.
Twitter advertisers who would like to use Twitter for promoting their product, service or business should know how Twitter ads pricing and ad auctions work and how much Twitter ads cost.
How much do Twitter Ads cost?
There are three different options available for advertising on Twitter depending on their advertising budget. Businesses with a limited advertising budget can use the promoted tweets option. For this, the advertiser is only charged per billable action.
There are different types of billable actions like clicks to visit the website of the advertiser, following the advertiser, engaging by liking, retweeting, installing a specified app, viewing the video, or viewing the preroll. Typically for promoted tweets, each billable action will cost between $0.5 to $2
Businesses who wish to use Twitter for branding use the Promoted Twitter account feature. In this case, the promoted account, its tweets are shown frequently to the target audience to increase the conversion rate. The advertiser is charged $2 to $4 for each follower he will acquire. This advertising option is popular for product launches.
Large companies who want more visibility on Twitter can use the promoted trends option which will cost $200,000 per day. The advertiser will be featured on Twitter’s newsfeed in trends.
What influences Twitter advertising pricing?
For Promoted Tweets and promoted accounts on Twitter, the advertiser will only have to pay if there is a billable action. If the advertiser’s tweet is shown to the user, and no action is taken, the advertiser will not have to pay anything.
Also, Twitter has an auction model for showing the tweets of its advertisers. If the advertiser wins the auction by having the highest bid, his tweet will be shown. Twitter also considers the relevance of the Tweet. If the Tweet does not have any billable action despite being shown repeatedly the quality score will be affected, and the advertiser may have to pay more.
The size of the business affects how much it can afford to spend on advertising. In some industry sectors, there is more competition, so advertising rates are higher. Often advertisers are interested in users from a particular country only leading to higher advertising rates.
Additionally, if the advertiser has a higher advertising budget, he will often pay more for every billable action.
How does the Twitter ad auction work?
Twitter auctions the advertising space available to determine the advertiser whose tweets will be shown to the target audience on Twitter. The target audience is determined based on the keyword which is being selected by the advertiser.
Every time the advertiser wins an auction, his promoted Tweet is shown to the Twitter users once. If there is no billable action,the advertiser will not be charged. Additionally, Twitter is considering the Ad score for the promoted Tweet.
The Ad score depends on multiple factors like whether people are engaging with the ad often, is the Tweet relevant to the Twitter audience and whether the Tweet is recent since Twitter rewards fresh content. If the ad score is high, the advertiser may have to pay less per bid.
Twitter bid types explained
Since many advertisers are not familiar with Twitter advertising, Twitter offers multiple options for bidding. In automatic bidding, Twitter will automatically adjust the bid amount, so that the tweets are shown at the earliest to the target audience.
Since many advertisers do not want to pay more for each billable action, they can set a maximum bid, and the bidding will be automated within these limits. The advertiser can also choose targetted bids, where he defines the average amount he would like to pay for each bid daily.
The advertising is then optimized to remain within these limits while generating the maximum billable actions.
How to optimize Twitter ad campaigns for better ROI?
To get a better ROI for Twitter advertising, the advertiser should review the ad campaigns regularly. They should pause or delete advertising which does not perform, replacing them with alternatives. It is advisable to have multiple tweets, with different images for each campaign.
The Twitter advertiser should consider increasing the budget for campaigns which leads to better conversion. The conversion rate for smartphones, tablets, and desktops may vary, and the bids should be adjusted accordingly.