Twitter's advertising platform is constantly evolving as the company looks to boost audience response and maximize revenue opportunities. As part of this, Twitter recently introduced an ads editor tool which enables advertisers to create and edit multiple campaigns at once by exporting the ad details to a spreadsheet then re-uploading them with updated details.
The tool makes it much easier to copy and edit past campaigns, without having to start from scratch every time. And now, Twitter's introduced another tool to help those working on multiple ad campaigns at once, with a new 'Ad Groups' functionality that enables advertisers to easily categorize and edit campaigns targeted at specific products and/or audiences within the same ad set.
From Twitter's announcement:
"Similar to how other ad platforms are structured, ad groups introduce a new level in our campaign hierarchy: one campaign can have many ad groups, and an ad group can have many targeting criteria and creatives. This level of granular control helps advertisers improve how they measure results, set promotion schedules, test different audiences, and identify which Tweets work best."
Through the combination of Ads Editor and Ad Groups, advertisers can now more easily target multiple focus groups, using Twitter's huge amount of variables, in order to more effectively maximize campaign performance and reach relevant audiences within the scope of your over-arching marketing objectives.
In your Twitter ads dashboard, campaigns divided into ad groups will appear in your listings with a blue "ad groups" badge. Once clicked, you'll be able to see the performance of each individual campaign within that set.
It's a helpful way to manage multiple campaigns and stay on top of individual performance, enabling you to tweak and refine each specific element in a more informed way. And while this type of grouping only applies to brands who are running multiple campaigns and audience splits, by making it easier to do, Twitter might also be able to encourage more smaller advertisers to also try it out.
Twitter's obviously not had a lot of good press in recent times, with the company struggling to boost both user growth and engagement, with their challenges on the former, in particular, causing significant declines in the company's stock price and overall perception. Can Twitter grow and become a bigger platform than it already is? It's hard to say - while the utility of the network is inarguable, it's convincing the general public of that value that still remains the core issue.
But that said, the narrative around Twitter's not all disaster. The platform's full-year revenue rose 48% year-on-year in the last quarter, with a full year delivery of $2.2 billion on the back of a 90% increase in active advertisers on the platform to 130,000. Of course, that's still well behind the numbers being posted by Facebook (Facebook now has 3 million active advertisers), but the levels of revenue being generated by the platform are significant - it's only on a comparative scale that Twitter's business looks to be failing, any other business that posted similar results would be lauded as a success. But Twitter's a social network, and as such, it'll always, inevitably, be compared to Facebook, and user growth and engagement will always be metrics the market looks to as logical indicators of potential future success. With changes at board room level, and the introduction of new ad features like Ads Editor and Ad Groups, the micro-blog giant will be hoping to tell a new story in its coming financial results.
Time will tell if it's a story the market wants to hear.
If you're looking for more information on Twitter's new ad options, they've added an education module to their free Twitter Flight School program, which covers all the details of how it works.