Twitter Adds New Services To Ads Self-Service Platform

Twitter has made huge improvements to its self-service platform for America-based Twitter advertisers, the microblogging site announced on its advertising blog yesterday. Twitter advertisers with access to the self-service platform now have new targeting options and access to Twitter’s advanced interface.


On Twitter’s self-service ads platform, businesses can pay to promote accounts and tweets, as well as view analytics showing how successful their promotions are. Advertisers must first be invited by Twitter to use the platform, then they can choose a location and a target audience, targeting by interests. Advertisers have to set a daily spending limit and will only be charged for what works.

Since yesterday, advertisers with access to the platform have had more detailed targeting options and access the advanced interface. According to the advertising blog, Twitter made the changes after listening to feedback from users:

As we listened to feedback, two requests kept coming up: marketers wanted access to more robust targeting tools, as well as a pathway to all the bells and whistles of our advanced interface if they desired it.

Self-service advertisers are now given two options when targeting Twitter users by interest: firstly, they can target users with similar interests to the followers of a specific Twitter handle. For example, if a camera manufacturer wanted to target amateur photographers, it could choose to promote tweets and accounts on the pages of people with similar interest to those who followed @PhotoMonthly or @LATimesPhotos.


Secondly, advertisers now have a list of over 350 different options to choose from when selecting which interests to target, from car racing, to birdwatching, to golf.

Advertisers can also specify on which devices their adverts will appear, choosing from a list of five tick-box options: desktop, iOS, Android, Blackberry and other mobile devices. This new feature is particularly helpful for app developers who create platform-specific applications: for example, the developer of an Android-only app can target Twitter uses solely on Android devices.

There is now the option to target a specific gender with advertising. Twitter extrapolates a user’s gender based on public user signals, surmising whether a user is male or female based on their activity on Twitter. A group of human testers discovered the system to be 90% accurate.


Twitter has made its advanced interface available to self-service advertisers, although they only advise more experienced advertisers to use it:

Self-service advertisers who are more experienced with online advertising can now choose to use our advanced interface’s deeper campaign controls, detailed reporting and analytics, and multi-campaign optimization, which help them run more complex campaigns and optimize in real time. The pricing remains the same, and you can start and stop campaigns at any time in both interfaces.

Advertisers new to the platform will be given the option to use the advanced interface after they have signed in, set up a promotion and entered their billing information. For advertisers who are already signed on, a link entitled “Switch to Advanced” will appear at the top of their dashboard after they have logged in.

Although the self-service ads platform is only available to stateside companies at the moment, and even then only by invitation, international advertisers should be given access later this year.

Have you used Twitter’s self-service platform? What are the improvements like?

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Will Sigsworth

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