From the advertiser’s perspective, media buying can sometimes feel like a one-sided affair — reach is ascertained, (hyper)targeting is set, and copy/creative are released into the digital wild. Sure, there exist the few comments here and there in response to these ad units, the sum of which is deemed another, but not quite as significant, metric marketers look at when gauging campaign success. After all, when one comments, is he/she engaged with the ad content or the Michael Jackson meme just there spectating?
Twitter has gone on the offensive in leveraging and measuring this there-but-not-really behavior with their new feature, i.e. Conversational Ads. These new ad units essentially work like comments, in that they incite user responses by asking him/her to make a choice — for example, an ice cream manufacturer can use a Conversational Ad to ask its customers “Which is better: #Chocolate or #Vanilla?”, to which the user can respond by tapping either hashtag. This then automatically fills out a new Tweet with the chosen hashtag and additional promotional messaging prefabricated by the advertiser.
The additional value with Conversational Ads is that advertisers can definitively track engagement for an ad via an end-user response — that is, the customer was in fact interested in chocolate ice cream and not Michael Jackson (RIP) — which is fantastic news.
Get more information on Twitter’s Conversational Ads by clicking at the link below: