Until Recently, Twitter Actually Made It Difficult To Buy Ads
Twitter's guilty secret is that the old API was so clunky it actually made it difficult for large, sophisticated advertisers to buy multiple, targeted campaigns on the platform with different variables.
We got a look at the old interface last week, and were bemused at what we saw. The process of running a set of campaigns on Twitter, and then comparing the results, was so laborious it would add hours to the ad buying process.
For instance, if an advertiser wants to run promoted tweets targeting people who are tweeting about "basketball," the advertiser has to type in "basketball" every time they start a new campaign with new variables. The advertiser can't just save a "basketball" campaign template, and then copy it as the basis for a new campaign.
This doesn't sound like much of a handicap unless you're a company with multiple brands, running multiple campaigns, and using dozens — 50 or more, sometimes — keyword targets.
For every new campaign, agency staff would have to punch in those 50 words by hand. A source tells us that punching in all those words over and over can add 15 hours of labor to any campaign.
Starting, pausing or stopping those campaigns triggered the same problem: Every campaign had to be stopped/started individually, a process that was time-consuming.
Getting the results was also a pain: Each campaign's results were delivered in a downloadable CSV file, which would then have to be opened in a spreadsheet. There were no lines, charts, or graphics that might make the experience visually intuitive, as modern campaign dashboards have.
Lastly, the targeting variables were thin: Advertisers can target users' perceived interests (based on the words in their tweets and the accounts they follow), their device type, and their gender. But even the gender targeting was primitive: It makes a best guess based on the name of the account holder. (Good luck correctly targeting the Alexes, Kellys, Jos and Pats of the world.)
Beyond that, there was little demographic targeting to be had. Facebook, by contrast, knows a LOT about its users. On Twitter, the account signup process asks for so little info that the company doesn't actually know very much about its users by comparison.
The newly available Ads APIs — rolled out soon from launch partners Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, Shift and TBG Digital — will likely fix some of these issues.