Happy Sunday as always! Excited to write about Twitter Ads, plus some other ad stuff I’m excited about like Advantage + Shopping and more. Since we launched Twitter ads, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how they’re performing and how to run them, so let’s chat about Twitter ads today.

Before we get started, a few things. Eli Weiss and I just kicked off season 3 of Down To Chat. We recorded episode 1 of the season yesterday, and we ended last season with a very special guest in Nik Sharma to talk all things landing pages. Check it out here.​

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If you told me 6 months ago that I’d be running Twitter ads and it was our most efficient channel, I would have had a good laugh. However, that’s exactly the case right now. Twitter Ads work well for direct performance goals, who would have thought? It’s not just JRB too, I have some consulting clients and friends who are also finding some great results on Twitter, so I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts, findings, and learnings today.

There really are two periods in Twitter Ads history: Pre-Elon and Post-Elon.

Pre-Elon, Twitter Ads were a hot mess for direct-response advertisers. There was no conversion pixel until very recently. In fact, you couldn’t even optimize for web visits. You could only optimize based on link clicks or on platform engagement. Therefore, large upper-funnel advertisers like multinational banks and corporations found success on the platform but direct response, lower funnel advertisers like yours truly instead stuck to their guns on Facebook and Google. Fortunately, the Twitter Ads product has made more progress in several months post-Elon than it did in the prior 10 years. From everything I can tell, Twitter is really eager to gain some of the DTC spend from other platforms. They’ve been really receptive to advertiser feedback, in fact I’ve been messaged by and met with top employees there on the ad product side, and our rep we’ve been assigned is the most receptive rep I’ve worked with across platforms. These interactions leave me feeling optimistic about their intentions and upcoming prospects. The employees who are still working there are post-Elon different breed and love a challenge.

I was never planning on testing Twitter, but post-Elon I, like many others started seeing a lot of random dropshipping ads on Twitter. Now dropshippers have terrible margins since they don’t hold any inventory, and they have no LTV since they are selling crap products. This means they can’t afford to spend a lot to acquire a customer. So if they are all of a sudden running tons of Twitter Ads, something must be working so I got curious and started learning that a few DTC advertisers were having success too.

When it comes to buying ads on Twitter, it’s now very similar to the experience of buying on Meta. If you’re used to Meta, you’ll quickly pick up the Twitter interface. One negative is that there is no native Shopify integration, so you’ll likely need to use Google Tag Manager.

I don’t feel confident sharing too many Twitter how-tos or best practices because I’m still pretty new to it and still have a lot to learn and test. However, I can share the objective nature of my findings since launching on the platform earlier this month. Much to my surprise, broad targeting is working by far the best for us. In fact, it’s the only targeting method that has worked at all so far. LLAs and interests did nothing good. So far, the traffic has been extremely, extremely cheap. I’m talking Facebook in 2016 level cheap. The traffic does not convert nearly as well as other platforms so far, but it’s not awful either, so there are some really cheap CPAs to be had since traffic is as low as a tenth of other platforms cost. In fact, across JRB as well as consulting clients, Twitter is the most efficient spend for many brands. This is obviously at a much lower volume than Meta, and frequency seems to get really high while pushing spend more aggressively.

For creative, I would test a mix of video and static. A good place to start is with top performers on Facebook. However, we’re testing more static, whereas we hardly do static on Facebook. People are definitely not on Twitter to shop, so the content needs to be upper funnel and speak to problems and education, rather than directly sell products. I definitely wouldn’t run Twitter to a homepage or PDP. Listicles can do really well on Twitter because people are reading or skimming short-form written content before seeing your ad, so you aren’t asking someone to frame shift by sending them to a listicle where they can do the same.

I’m not super surprised by cheap traffic but not great conversion rates, but I am shocked by how great Twitter AOV can be. So far, it’s by far the highest of all of our paid channels. Why? I am not sure, but I love it. Twitter reps tell me their users skew more affluent than other platforms, which makes sense to me. One thing I don’t yet have an idea of is where in the funnel Twitter sits. For example, Google is pure bottom of funnel, Facebook is mid funnel, and TikTok and Youtube sit at the top. You should have different 1 day click ROAS targets built on a model of where a platform sits in the funnel for your business. I just don’t have enough of an idea of where Twitter sits. If I had to guess, it’s mid funnel and certainly not an awareness channel like Youtube. However, we are driving a high % of new visitors from the platform so maybe I’m wrong. Time will tell.

Look if you’re a smaller brand with limited resources, you don’t need to be messing with Twitter. If your Facebook ads are not doing well, don’t expect Twitter to save you. But if you’re having success on other platforms and trying to find additional channels to spend dollars on profitably, you need to be considering Twitter. I think Twitter will start to take up a lot of spend that is currently going to TikTok. They’ve come a long ways in a short amount of time, and I’m going to be testing and watching very closely to see what improvements they can make. Have any other specific questions about Twitter Ads or feedback that I can share with their team? Let me know!

A few other quick thing that are on my mind. If you’re not testing Advantage + campaigns on Facebook, you need to be. They are single-handedly reviving Facebook Ads for many brands. I consistently find them to be the most stable campaigns with the best efficiency across accounts. TikTok has also launched their counterpart called Smart Performance Campaigns, which are also doing amazingly well. In general, you should be leaning into machine learning advancements as much as possible instead of doing too much manual media buying. Do you want me to write more about this in an upcoming issue? If so please reply.

There's one more cool acquisition opportunity you should know about. As we know, affordably acquiring customers is the largest challenge we all face. There's a cool new chrome extension called Mosey that is helping brands buy high quality traffic from customers who are rewarded for discovering new products. Imagine this, instead of paying Zuck or Elon for traffic, you are essentially paying a user to visit your site. A Mosey user earns money when they discover a certain number of new brands, buys your product, or joins your email list. Just by listing on Mosey, you can get thousands of high intent shoppers to your site. Consider Mosey the matchmaker between your brand and potential high value customers. Mosey will list your brand in front of it's highly engaged shoppers who are motivated to check out and discover you, all for a modest cost for you. Mosey is just now out of closed beta and opening it's waitlist to new brands. They're offering $200 off your first campaign. Just mention you came from my newsletter. Sign up here. Sponsored.

I hope you have a great, productive week upcoming and are ready to close out February and tackle March to end Q1 strong. If you have any topics you'd like me to write about next week, please reply here. Also I'll be opening up a few spots for ad account audits in March. Let me know if you'd like to reserve one.

See you next week!

-Cody

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