Twitter Video Ads

If your business is looking to promote a video with ads, it makes complete sense to want to run to YouTube first. It is my favorite channel; it’s a video platform, I get that. But one thing we always stress to advertisers is to look at other channels. Some of these targeting options that we have within Twitter aren’t available in any other paid media platform.

So in this video, we’re going to cover video views campaign objective, to see if it’s the right channel for you to promote your video. We’re going to cover the specs, a little bit over the targeting options, and then we’ll cover some of the metrics and the columns you can view to see if promoting your video on Twitter is the good choice for your business.

I am in the main account dashboard in Twitter ads, and when you are in this view, there are two ways we can create a new campaign. The easiest way will be to go up to create campaign, pretty straightforward. But if you are not in this main dashboard view, you can head over to campaigns in the top navigation.

If you click on it, there will be the option in the dropdown under ads manager. We can create a campaign. To make a video ads campaign within Twitter, we need to choose the video views campaign objective, which is the top option in the consideration column.

Now, before I hit next, I at least want to acknowledge the second option right below, pre-roll views, because technically, this campaign objective also uses videos. But I am not going to cover the pre-roll view’s campaign objective, because odds are you are looking for the video views objective.

But think of pre-roll views, just the same as you would a skippable TrueView in-stream ad on YouTube. Your video will show up before another publisher’s video, so pretty much you’re attaching your video to some of the video content from some of the most-watched publishers on the Twitter platform. But with video views, the one I have selected, you’re going to be promoting your own video, and that is what we’re going to move forward with for the campaign creation.

So I’m going to go down and hit next, and then we get to the campaign details. I’m just going to go and create a campaign name, then when I scroll down a little bit, we see funding source. You have the option to change your daily budget, include an optional total budget, then you can choose a start date and an end date. Then if we go down to advanced, you can choose the pacing of the budget. So standard pacing will help spread your budget throughout the day.

So this $100 that I currently have, set they’re not going to try to spend it as fast as possible. That would be the accelerated pacing which we currently have selected. Depending on what I have selected as my targeting options, try to spend this $100 as soon as possible if it’s getting in front of the audience I have selected within the next screen. I’m just going to leave it as is, and then we can move on to the next section.

So I’m going to go over and hit next again. I already went ahead and named my ad group just to save a little bit of time, but then we get to the ad group delivery. We see there is an optional ad group budget. If you’re only going to have one ad group within the campaign, you don’t need to do anything with this.

But if you have multiple ad groups, in this example, maybe you want to have one overall campaign, but you’re testing a little bit different audience targets, and if you want to have a specific budget for any one of your ad groups, you can set it at the ad group level, and then the remaining campaign budget will be dispersed between whichever other ad groups you may have within the campaign.

Dropping down to the next section, I’m going to highlight the goal, what should this ad group optimize towards? There are a few different options. The default option that we see right here is for 15-second video views. Twitter says this option is trying to achieve at least 15-second views or completed views.

With this selection, you are charged on a CPM model, that is cost per 1000 impressions. Since you’re charged from a CPM model, there’s going to be a decent percentage of users who don’t hit the 15 seconds. The next option will be video views. Now Twitter states video views are when your video is watched in 50 views for two seconds or more.

Or this can also include when someone clicks to expand your video, or to interact with it by muting or unmuting the video. So we can see with fifty percent view, the entire video does not have to be visible on the screen, just half of it, and they only have to look at it for two seconds. So you’re going to have to decide if that awareness is important to you.

Let’s choose our next option that is going to be three second, 100% video views. This happens when your video is 100% visible on the user’s screen for at least three seconds, and just like the video views option, this can also occur when someone expands or mutes or unmute your video.

Then the last call option is going to be six-second video views. Here we go back to the 50% view, so only half of your video on the screen, but the user needs to watch it for at least six seconds. Once again, clicks for expanding your video or un-muting your video also count.

As early heads up, Twitter warns this specific goal for your video ads campaigns is not available for retargeting at this moment. So any audiences that you have created for Twitter remarketing. That includes customer lists, website visits, app interactions; you will have to choose a different campaign goal if you want to use a video views campaign objective.

So this is definitely one of the unique parts of a video views campaign. So we can see how the goal portion of the ad group setup is pretty unique to the video views campaign objective. But then, we can scroll down to bid strategy. The default and recommended option will be auto-bid; this is letting Twitter try to optimize towards the best results depending on what ad group goal you have selected, and then if you choose maximum bid, it’s going to give you more control over how much you’re paying per video view.

Remember, sometimes that view can count on clicks and interactions with the video ad. So as we go down to the next section is pay by, we’re paying by the six-second video view, because that is the goal that we have selected. If I go back and switch it to the recommended 15-second video view, remember that’s the one I said has a CPM model, so I’m paying by the impression. The other two goals were video view based as well; they’re just different results on how they’re counted as a view.

This section, the pay by section will automatically update depending on which goal you have selected. You can hear my mouse clicking right now. I can’t change anything, there’s no other dropdown. So it’s pretty much out of our hands. Just focus on the ad group goal. Jumping down a little bit, you can set a frequency cap, initially, I would leave it as automatically optimized.

Then as the campaign goes on, if you’re saying that users are seeing your ad too frequently, you may be concerned it might be a little bit annoying, then you can always go back and edit the ad group details to control the amount of impressions a user may see your video ad in a certain amount of days. We see those options are one day, seven days or 30 days. I’m going to close this out and scroll down.

Here, we pretty much get to all the targeting options on Twitter, and I am not going to spend too much time on this, because I’ve already created a video on the targeting options that you have within Twitter; you can watch that one right here. I’ll admit, it’s a little bit out of date, but for the most part, everything covered in that video is still relevant. So you can get a better understanding of what options you have to get in front of your target audience.

So we see the main demographic data gender, age, location. You can choose a specific language; scrolling down, we can choose specific devices, device models and carriers. Custom audiences, if you have created some of the retargeting options, you can include them here, unless it was the six-second view audience that we discussed before.

Once we get down to targeting features, here’s where some of the unique options that are really only available on Twitter exist. Since I want to include something at least for this example campaign, let’s choose a few different options just to get an understanding.

So first could be keywords, and as I started to include some deeper targeting options, we see that my audience estimate on the right-hand side noticeably went down; let’s try to find another one. Adding a few more, it popped back up.

A very unique option is going to be follower lookalikes; you’re not targeting an accounts follower; you’re pretty much-reaching people who have similar interests as the users who follow these accounts. So there are just a few options. Again, there are a lot of other types of targeting options that you can look at, so go check out the other targeting video I mentioned so you can get a better understanding.

Next, we have some control over the placements; this is where people can see your ads. We cannot turn off home timelines, pretty much the main home feed, and I don’t know why you would want to do that anyway. You could turn off profiles, that is, someone’s looking at a specific account, going through that account’s history of tweets, potentially, an ad can show up within that user’s feed. Then the search results, there is a search engine feature to Twitter.

So if someone’s looking for a specific hashtag, topics about tweets, whatever the results are from whatever the user was searching, potentially ads can appear within that feed as well. I always like to leave everything on because I’m mostly targeting an audience, not necessarily where that user is viewing information.

Next, we get down to the creatives. If you’ve created a tweet with a video in it, you can already select one of the old options. But if you want to create something new, you can head to this button right here, create tweet; it’s got the plus and the little quill; I’m just proud of myself that I knew what that symbol was, and then we can go ahead and create our tweet.

Now I already made a video that went over the specs for the main ad formats for Twitter ads, and we did talk about video ads within that other one. But I still want to cover them for this particular video because it’s important. The first part is the tweet copy, and for a video ad, we get 280 characters. In this case, I added a link; every link that you use will reduce the character count by 23 characters.

Next, I’m going to select photo or video; once we get down, we’re going to show that it is a video file. But if you want to choose a call to action, you can add it. The default option will be sending users to your website, but you also can promote your app. If you choose the app category, it’s going to take away the URL; default CTA is going to be installed.

If I switch it back to website, we see if they click on any portion of that; I know I needed a headline; it’s just going to send users to my main URL. I just named my card really quick, and then we can choose the media. Now the option I selected was photo or video, but in the case of video, we can see the file types that are accepted are MP4s or the MOV files.

The file size for videos can be one-gigabyte max, but Twitter recommends to try to keep them under 30 megabytes. I just upload a video. It’s from our old bloopers one, I’m sorry, Michelle, it’s just the only thing I had. I know this particular video is fairly short. Twitter does recommend a 15 second or less video, just understand the user behavior of Twitter, they’re scrolling constantly, attention spans are a lot lower.

But videos up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds are supported. So if you really feel you’ll have a strong video content that’s going to keep users engaged and going to keep them from scrolling within the feed, go for it. But I actually do agree with Twitter on this one to try to keep your videos a smaller length. This is not YouTube; people do not go to Twitter purely to watch videos.

So either make your creative extremely entertaining if you want a longer video, or just get to the point so they can move on. But if I scroll back up, I can head back to the main media section, and there we can add a headline and website URL. Note that this URL can be different than any of the URLs that I put within my actual copy.

Understand it’s a boring headline. Hopefully, you can have something more engaging for your users, but now you see what this tweet would look like now that I’ve put it all together. I can go back up, tweet this right now, or I could save this as a draft or schedule it for later. In this case, I’m going to schedule it for later, knowing that my campaign will eventually go live.

So then I’ll click schedule, and then you can see they’re keeping me on the tweet composer. That’s because when I needed to create a new tweet, it opened up another tab. So let me go back into the ad group setup, and then I need to drop down to the selection right here.

Because the creatives I can already select right now are only looking at the organic tweets, but I can look at other promoted only tweets, and in my case, the one I created as a draft I scheduled it for later and there’s the new tweet that I just created with the video. I don’t need to preview it because we already saw it in the tweet composer.

But if you’re going through older tweets and you don’t remember what it looks like when you created it, you can go up and take a look at it. Then I can go and hit next, go over my campaign details. If everything looks good, I can click launch campaign.

The last thing I want to cover is looking at the metrics. We see there are default options for promoted video views that really satisfy this campaign objective. I’m going to leave the view here, because this is the only video views objective campaign I have set up within this account. But this default column’s view looks at impressions, spend, video views and remember video views are counted differently depending on the ad group goal.

So in this view, I’m looking at things from the campaign level. You may want to switch up here to the ad group level if you’ve created multiple ad groups with different goals. But then next, we see cost per video view, how many video starts. If I scroll over, we’ll get stats on if the video was played to 25%, 50%, 75% or was watched completely.

Now we see the campaign start date, potential end date, total budgets, results, result rate, cost per result, daily budget, campaign remaining budget if you set a total lifetime amount and the daily pacing. This can better help you decide if you want to do more standard throughout the day or the accelerated pacing. Now, this is looking purely at video views, but you still can go up to metrics and then customize them.

Right now, we have pretty much all the video view options, but as I’m scrolling through all these, I can add additional things like clicks. Are they retweeting the specific ad? More engagement type metrics. As I get down more towards promoted video views, look at all the other options you have.

So if you know you’re choosing specific campaign goals, you can add all of these to the mix. There are different campaign objectives here, as I almost missed it, conversions. If you want to see if your videos are actually driving actions on your website, or of course, app installs if that was a different objective or card that you’ve selected, see if your video ads are having an impact in that result.

If it is a video views campaign objective, I do like to start off with the default column views, but then I can remove certain ones like remaining budget, total budget, if it is an ongoing daily budget and start including the options that are important for that specific campaign objective.

You’ve probably heard Michelle and I say this multiple times, your audience visits more websites than Google and Facebook. As I’ve said before, Twitter has unique targeting options that other channels just do not have. So if you’re looking for a new way to engage your users with video, you might as well give Twitter ads a try. Twitter is a great platform for users to discover brands.

So I traditionally like to use video on Twitter from a first engagement with some of my clients brands. If you’re trying to use this to keep in front of a very specific audience, keep your content fresh. The video creative that you use on Twitter needs to be updated frequently. Look how fast content on Twitter updates; people don’t want to see the same things over and over again. So refresh your video content, keep on testing, find out what’s going to engage with users that is when you’re going to see the best results.

If you’ve run video views campaign objectives on Twitter before, how have they worked for you? Let everyone know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez