Keeping Twitter ads relevant with conversation targeting

We all know that building the right audience for your online ads campaigns is essential. Even with the most original creative and compelling copy, an ad delivered to the wrong audience won’92t perform well. Getting your targeting right helps you avoid wasted spend, all while driving conversions.

On Twitter, one particularly powerful option for reaching the right people at the right time is conversation targeting.

What is conversation targeting?

Twitter conversation targeting lets you create audiences around the specific things people are talking about on the network. You can choose from over ten thousand conversation topics across 25 categories, including places, products, sports, music, and more. Twitter uses a combination of a rule-based keyword algorithm, that carefully matches keywords and phrases to conversation topics, and hand curation in defining conversations.

To ensure the targeting is timely and that the users who see your ads are freshly engaged in the topics relevant to your brand, the lookback window for conversation targeting is 28 days. In other words, the audience will only include users who tweeted about or engaged with a given topic up to 28 days prior.

Conversation targeting differs from keyword targeting on Twitter in a couple of ways:

• Keywords are more freeform’97any phrase or combination of words can be used for targeting, so they aren’t “curated” in the way that conversation targeting is.
• Conversations also incorporate more immediacy than keywords, which don’92t benefit from the same restricted lookback window.

Reaching engaged communities at the right moment

Part of what makes conversation targeting so interesting for advertisers is the context of Twitter itself. The strength of Twitter as an advertising platform is that it’s The place people gather virtually around live and current events, from sporting events to awards shows to the latest trends and more. It’s slogan says it all: It’s what’s happening. So Twitter offers a unique opportunity for brands to reach consumers at key moments.

How could your brand use conversation targeting?

Conversation targeting helps you gain in efficiency, saving you the effort of setting up lots of keywords to target your ads.

For example, if you are a retailer who sells running shoes, instead of creating a long list of all of the keywords related to the subject, you can simply target the running conversation topic. Twitter’s algorithm then automatically targets the conversations related to the subject to deliver your ads to the people most passionate about running and actively (and recently) engaged with the topic and who are more likely to find your ads relevant.

The immediacy of conversation targeting also makes it easier for your brand to leverage topics that are trending from pop culture to sports to politics to better market your products. It’s a more efficient way to effectively reach the highly engaged communities that can make Twitter so interesting for advertisers.