Dive Brief:
- Twitter’s logged-out visitors to its mobile website will begin being served ads sometime in Q2 per a regulatory filing, as reported by Marketing Land.
- The micro-blogging network began serving ads to logged-out visitors on desktop last December. Running ads on the mobile web doesn't come as a surprise since 88% of Twitter's ad revenue in Q1 came from mobile.
- Another reason for expanding the logged-out ad program to mobile users is that desktop test found marketers were paying "nearly" as much for logged-out ad clicks as they were for ads served to logged-in users.
Dive Insight:
The move might also be at least in part in reaction to a mixed Q1 earnings report that found ad revenue was up 37% year-over-year, but substantially lower than the previous quarter. After Q1 results were released, including sluggish user growth, Twitter’s stock dropped some 12% in extended trade.
Eighty-three percent of Twitter’s logged-in visitors in Q1 came via mobile over the desktop. Given the slow growth in its user base coupled with a great majority of its visitors coming to the platform on mobile devices is an easy way to tap into a potentially lucrative revenue stream. It also opens a new marketplace for advertisers.
However, because those users are logged-out, campaigns can’t take advantage of targeting options available for campaigns reaching logged-in users. Even if not as precise, this can still be valuable for advertisers leveraging trending topics, popular hashtags and real-time events. The ads can be targeted to specific tweets or profile pages viewed by logged-out visitors.
That being said, advertisers looking for more specific data targeting capabilities would benefit more from logged in experiences. And whether it will pay off for Twitter in helping it win over ad dollars is unclear.
Gila Wilensky, search and biddable director at WPP's Essence, told Marketing Land after the logged-out desktop news from December, "I don’t think that is necessarily the best use of media dollars, to get someone who is a super light Twitter user who’s just looking at one thing that we don’t have much data on them."