On 11 June, Twitter announced on its blog that retargeting using “Tailored audiences” is now available to all advertisers via the vanilla Twitter ads interface. Previously it had only been available to advertisers via Marketing Platform Partners.

Twitter explains how to set up a remarketing campaign here.

In this case, we we’re on a recruitment drive, and I’m keen to remarket to potential employees who have visited the career-related pages on the Xelsion website.

Firstly we need to create a Twitter remarketing tag. A Twitter remarketing tag is the same as creating a conversion tracking tag. In fact, one tag can serve both purposes. If you’ve installed a tag management solution such as Google Tag Manager on your site then installing this tag on your website is a matter of minutes.

Creating a campaign to target your remarketing list is then also a quick process. Promoted tweets and promoted account ad types are both available. During the set up you also have the option to “expand reach by targeting similar users” via Twitter’s own look-a-like modelling. Given the power of Facebook’s similar look-a-like modelling feature in Custom Audiences, this is an exciting and easy to use feature.

And that’s it, Twitter remarketing up and running. We’re tracking the activity via DoubleClick Campaign Manager and it will be interesting to see the results compared to Facebook and banner ad display retargeting.

Twitter is following what is becoming a familiar strategy. First create an open platform to enable 3rd parties to build out additional functionality. Once third parties have familiarised the market with their extensions to the platform then choose which features to build in-house. We’ve seen something similar with Facebook. Originally they rolled out Facebook Exchange (FBX) which allowed advertisers to use first and third party data via Facebook API partners to target ads on Facebook; seeing the success of this Facebook then built out the Custom Audience product for all advertisers directly in its ads product.

This strategy puts the original third party platform partners in a difficult position. The features which were originally additions to the core platform functionality are now simply mirrors of the existing features. These partners then have to evolve to offer more again than their foundational platform or risk becoming redundant.

If you’d like help with setting up Twitter remarketing campaigns please contact us.