Twitter's ad campaign tools get a major update

Running ad campaigns on Twitter may become easier and more useful, thanks to an update announced today. According to the official Twitter Advertising Blog, the new features include objective-based campaigns, reports,- and pricing.

The idea here is to allow advertisers to more easily create marketing campaigns that actually work. And you only have to pay for the actions that you want people to take when faced with your ads. If you want to get more clicks to your website, that’s the action you’d pay for — nothing else.

Okay, so let’s run down what these features actually entail. For starters, objective-based campaigns allow you to select from numerous objectives like website clicks, conversions, new followers, email signups, app installs, or tweet engagements. The options are available beneath the phrase, “I want more…” You can’t get much more straightforward than that.

(Of note: Facebook’s self-serve ad campaigns have had these features for some time.)

Then you can pick your preferred ad format based on what works best with your objectives. And since you’re only paying for the objectives you want, you’ll get the best ROI out of the deal. At least that’s Twitter’s reasoning.

These features are currently in beta right now, but are only available to small-to-medium sized businesses and API partners. The next couple of months will see managed clients receiving invites to try the ad features out for themselves.

After launching a campaign, you can track your results. New reports show you specifically how your objective-based campaign is fairing, making it easy to see where it could use some help. And you can download it all via a CSV file, no sweat.

Twitter says the alpha has shown promising results so far for these new features, with participants calling the new platform “intuitive” and designed to help “deliver extremely strong results.”

More changes are on the horizon, of course. Twitter says it wants to, “make it easier and faster for all businesses to succeed on Twitter Ads,” so it should be interesting to see how objective-based campaigns perform as they transition out of beta.

Twitter Ads first launched in 2010 with Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. In November of last year, the social giant rolled out new ad targeting capabilities. And a year ago, it launched Lead Generation Cards, which proved to boost engagement considerably.