Anything Goes Monday: What I Learned From Twitter Ads

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Advertisements. You see them when driving, you see them in stores, you even see it on the television. However, one form of advertising that is gaining traction is online advertisements. You might see posts on several forms of social media, or you might get a video advertisement on YouTube. With that being said, I decided to run a Twitter advertisement for 24 hours. This was a quick test since I am making an e-mail list in the near future. Here are some of the things I have learned from this 24-hour experiment.

Impressions vs Clicks

If you have ever looked at your Google AdSense information, you have probably seen that there are things called impressions and clicks. An 'impression' is when someone has seen your ad, but they don't click on it. The unfortunate thing is that we don't know how long they have looked at it, or if they just scrolled by quickly. A click is when someone actually clicks your link to view whatever you are advertising. The real information comes from the click-through rate, which is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. Based on this information, you can see how effective your ad was, and what you could potentially change, or do better next time. It could range from a poor quality image, poor title, or even not targeting the right audience.

You Don't Need A Lot of Money to Get Started

Go ahead and take a guess on how much money I spent. $100? $200? Nope, I only spent $5 on the advertisement, and that increased my traffic tremendously. While I only got a little under 100 people to click my link, the traffic to my blog has been increasing slowly. If it wasn't for a slow start at the beginning of July, it would have been the most page views I would have received in a month. The fact that you don't need much money to start should be the main reason why any blogger should test out advertisements on social media.

Increased Revenue/AdSense

Many people don't think about it, but it should speak for itself. More traffic equals more money, assuming you are running AdSense or some sort of advertisements on your blog. Also, if you're targeting one of the main countries for your advertisements, (United States, United Kingdom, etc.) there's a good chance that you could get a higher than average CPM (cost per mille) for the advertisements being shown on your blog.

Seeing Through The Eyes of a Marketer

As I talked about before, your AdSense page has a lot of information. It talks about views, impressions, CPM, etc. When you run Twitter advertisements (or mostly any other social media advertisements), you will see something similar to this, and much more. This page gives you A LOT of information on how you can improve, and that's up to you on how to interpret it. While it can be difficult for people who know nothing about marketing (myself included) to make decisions, this experiment will definitely make you more educated on the topic.

Have you ever run Twitter advertisements in the past? Have you ever tried running social media ads, or are running some right now? Let me know what your thoughts are down below!

Anything Goes Monday is a new series on my blog where I talk about a topic not related to music. Anything Goes Monday will take place on the first Monday of each month. Stay tuned for more Anything Goes Mondays and let me know what you think of the segment! Check out the previous Anything Goes Monday here!

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