Twitter’s new ads experiment: cookies and CRM

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Twit­ter is cur­rent­ly test­ing an excit­ing devel­op­ment in Twit­ter ads in the US – the abil­i­ty to tar­get ads with cook­ies and CRM data. Mar­keters already use this fea­ture on Face­book, Google, Ama­zon and many oth­er web­sites, but this is a first for the micro-blog­ging platform.

Kevin Weil, Twit­ter senior direc­tor of prod­uct for rev­enue, wrote in a blog post that this makes ads more use­ful for users by “dis­play­ing pro­mot­ed con­tent from brands and busi­ness­es they’ve shown inter­est in.”

This announce­ment means brands could soon tar­get ads on Twit­ter more specif­i­cal­ly, in turn giv­ing users bet­ter qual­i­ty of ads that meet their inter­ests and needs.

What does this mean for marketers?

• We will need clos­er rela­tion­ships with our web man­age­ment teams to ensure the data they col­lect will work. Track­ing data, like brows­er cook­ie IDs, will enable us to show ads to users based on the things they looked for while vis­it­ing our websites.
• Mar­keters will need to up their game when it comes to ad con­tent. As the ads users see will be more tar­get­ed to their inter­ests, ‘one-size-fits-all’ ads could become a thing of the past.
• Although users won’t see more ads, mar­keters will cer­tain­ly have to cre­ate more ads to meet the demand of per­son­al­i­sa­tion. Mar­keters will need to ensure they are using the right tools to take on yet anoth­er group of per­son­alised, tar­get­ed ads.
• And last­ly, we’ll need to con­tin­ue to invest in social. It isn’t some­thing mar­keters can use occa­sion­al­ly and expect suc­cess. The announce­ment of tar­get­ed ads gives us hope that engage­ment rates for Twit­ter ads will climb.

Of course, US users have the option to opt-out in two ways: un-check “pro­mot­ed con­tent” in account set­tings, or enable Do Not Track on their web browsers.

The blog didn’t say when or if the ser­vice would roll out glob­al­ly. There are some road­blocks to the ser­vice, espe­cial­ly here in Europe, and it’s unclear how Twit­ter will com­ply with cur­rent EU laws to obtain users con­sent for cookies.

Will you try this new ad type if it’s rolled out in Europe? Tell us in the com­ments or tweet us @AdobeMktgCloud.