Twitter’s Newest Feature: Conversion Tracking

Late on December 18th, Twitter rolled out a new feature to help marketers figure out how their investment in Promoted Tweets was working with new Conversion Tracking. The new menu item appears in their Ads interface:

Setting up conversion tracking is as simple as one would expect – you name the conversion something easy to remember, then specify what kind of conversion you’re tracking.

Twitter offers 4 pre-defined conversion types, plus a custom type:

• Site visit: User visits a landing page on an your site
• Purchase: User completes a purchase of a product or service on the your site
• Download: User downloads a file, such as a white paper or software package, from the your site
• Sign up: User signs up for the your service, newsletter, or email communication
• Custom: This is a catch-all category for a custom action that does not fall into one of the categories above

With this level of conversion tracking, you can set up multiple goals to track the performance of your ads all the way down the funnel, from website visits to shopping cart checkouts. As an example, we’ve added tracking to our contact page first:

Once you’ve implemented Twitter’s conversion tracking, you can head to any of your existing paid campaigns to start viewing your conversions. Note that the cost per conversion tracking is going to be wonky for the first few weeks as the data settles dow, unless you change the scope of your reporting window:

Also bear in mind that at present, Twitter doesn’t permit you to set different values per conversion in terms of monetary cost, so a site visit is valued at the same cost per action rate as a lead form completion or purchase. If you’re using Twitter’s conversion tracking as the sole source of what’s working, then you’ll want to only track the most valuable goals.

It’s equally important to note that the conversion tracking doesn’t currently track organic, non-paid efforts in any way. For that, you’ll need to combine your web analytics and marketing automation data to separate out what’s unpaid versus what’s paid.

Twitter’s conversion tracking is new and we expect it to iterate over the next weeks and months into a more robust analysis product that lets advertisers see what’s working, but even in its first release, it’s a good start. Be sure to turn it on and implement it if you’re doing any paid Twitter advertising!

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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