HowAboutWe say they have had huge success using Twitter’s targeted advertising services.
The New York-based dating site used Twitter’s geo and interest-targeting ads to promote deals for their Couples service.
The campaign ran in the third quarter of 2013, across the five markets their couples dating service operates in – Seattle, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It used promoted tweets offering a $50 discount for dates booked through the site.
They told Clickz.com that those who found the deals on Twitter were 20% more likely to become paying subscribers.
This was in comparison to the other ways they promoted the offer – such as email campaigns, and on the website itself.
HowAboutWe also found that this campaign “improved its cost per acquisition by 800% over other Twitter campaigns that didn’t offer a discount.”
The date-focused singles and couples site also said that 30% of their total traffic now comes from Twitter.
The site’s co-founder, Brian Schechter, told Clickz.com that advertising on Twitter was not always so effective:
“In the early days, our experience was lackluster both from the standpoint of our ability to target and of our ability to have transparency into what was happing with specific campaigns.
“All the basic things you’d expect from an ad platform were not there.”
However, the introduction of Tailored Audience Advertising – which lets advertisers define their target audience and connect with them on Twitter – helped their campaigns.
Schechter said: “Twitter has definitely reached a level of maturity where we can rely on it.”
However HowAboutWe’s director of user acquisition, Aaron Stein, said he thinks Twitter’s services can be further improved.
He said: “We wish it was a platform like Google AdWords where you can do things like make bulk edits to bids and campaign budgets, or update a lot of different tweets to test a bunch of stuff at once.
“There is still a lot of manual stuff that’s necessary.”
HowAboutWe also told Clickz that they monitor their campaigns more successfully using the tools of the individual services, rather than a third-party all-in-one monitoring service for campaigns across multiple platforms.
Schechter said: “I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but what we care about is that each platform is highly efficient, rather than the dream of everything bundled into one platform.
“We have experimented in the past, but it never comes close to efficiency you find using the actual ad platform.”