Do you think the new targeting capability makes Twitter more valuable for businesses? Let us know in the comments.

With keyword targeting, advertisers can reach users based on words in their recent tweets and in tweets with which they’ve recently engaged.

“This is an important new capability – especially for those advertisers looking for signals of intent – because it lets marketers reach users at the right moment, in the right context,” says Twitter Revenue product manager Nipoon Malhotra. “For example: let’s say a user tweets about enjoying the latest album from their favorite band, and it so happens that band is due to play a concert at a local venue. That venue could now run a geotargeted campaign using keywords for that band with a Tweet containing a link to buy the tickets. That way, the user who tweeted about the new album may soon see that Promoted Tweet in their timeline letting them know tickets are for sale in their area.”

According to Twitter, users are more likely to engage with promoted tweets that take advantage of keyword targeting. The company ran tests with clients like GoPro, Everything Everywhere, Microsoft Japan and Walgreens, and found this to be the case.

“After testing keyword targeting in timeline across four marketing campaigns, GoPro saw close to two million impressions, and engagement rates as high as 11 percent on Tweets promoted using the new feature,” says Malhotra.

Twitter’s new offering has been drawing comparisons to search advertising. Peter Kafka at All Things D says it’s Twitter making its ad pitch “more Googley”. Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch also compares it to search.

In fact, even Malhotra plays the search card, saying, “Setting up a campaign to target keywords in the timeline is very similar to the setup process for search. Enter the keywords you want to target, choose whether you want to use phrase match or unordered keyword match, and specify your other targeting options such as geographic location, device and gender.”

As Kafka notes, however, some have been quick to point out that it’s not exactly like search in that the intent expressed in a tweet is hardly reflective of the intent of a search. Essentially, when you’re searching, you’re looking for something. When you’re tweeting, you’re simply saying something. Occasionally, that might be a signal of something you’re interested in buying, but how often?

The set-up process is about as easy as it could possibly be. You simply go to Twitter’s Advertisers page, log in, and follow the steps. Tell Twitter who you want to target, what you want to promote, how much you want to spend, and how you want to pay. That’s pretty much it.

Some are still skeptical about how effective the new feature will make Twitter for advertisers, but it certainly can’t hurt. The functionality is available in the full Twitter Ads user interface as well as through the Ads API.

What do you think? Does this make Twitter a better place to advertise? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Now, when deciding who to promote their accounts and tweets to, businesses who use Twitter’s self-service ads have a few new options to narrow it down. First, advertisers can select to target users who follow specific accounts that are similar to the field in which the advertiser is advertising.

For example, if a craft brewery wanted to target their promoted tweets toward people with an interest in beer, they could target users with the same interests as those who follow accounts like @DrinkCraftBeer, @BeerAdvocate, or specific craft breweries like Dogfish Head or Southern Tier.

Advertisers can also choose to target users inside 350 different “interest categories” – beer, golf, birdwatching, and so on.

Additionally, new targeting options include users’ devices and operating systems. This is a particularly useful options, as an Android game developers could target their tweets to Android users, or the makers of an iOS app could target just iOS users.

Twitter has also added gender targeting for self-service advertisers.

According to Twitter, these were some of the the most demanded features from those advertisers inside the self-service ad network.

Twitter has also opened up its advanced interface to all U.S. advertisers.

“Self-service advertisers who are more experienced with online advertising can now choose to use our advanced interface’s deeper campaign controls, detailed reporting and analytics, and multi-campaign optimization, which help them run more complex campaigns and optimize in real time. The pricing remains the same, and you can start and stop campaigns at any time in both interfaces,” says Twitter.

If you’re an advertiser that wants to switch over to the advanced interface, just log in and select the “switch to advanced” link at the top of your dashboard.

As of now, the self-service ad platform is still invitation only for U.S. businesses. Twitter says that they will start expanding internationally later this year.

“With Lookalike Audiences, advertisers can expand their reach to specific geographic areas or audiences who are not already fans of the company’s page while still maintaining the desired demographic profile of their existing audience using Facebook’s algorithms,” a Facebook spokesperson tells WebProNews. “When using Custom Audiences, the data is hashed so no information is shared between the advertiser and Facebook.”

Lookalike Audiences is currently in beta in Facebook’s Power Editor tool for advertisers. According to Inside Facebook, advertisers in the beta are seeing lower costs per action than with traditional targeting options. Brittany Darwell reports:

Lookalike Audiences can be created after an advertiser has uploaded a list of first-party data, such as customer email addresses, phone numbers or user IDs to make a Custom Audience. Facebook’s algorithms analyze the Custom Audience and produce another audience segment that is likely to have a similar customer profile. The advertiser can then create any Facebook ad type and target it to the Lookalike Audience. No personally identifiable information is shared back with advertisers and Lookalike Audiences can only be used within Facebook, not exported for email marketing or other ad targeting.

In other Facebook ad-related news, the company has reportedly agreed to implement the AdChoices industry standard icon on its display ads served through the Facebook Exchange, following complaints from advertisers.

And with that, the company has announced gender targeting, which it says human testers have found to be over 90% accurate, despite the fact that Twitter does not know for sure when users are male or female.

“We’ve frequently heard from marketers that you’d like to be able to target your Promoted Products campaigns by gender,” says Twitter Revnue Product Manager Apri Underwood. “It’s a tough feature for us to pull off since we don’t ask people to share their gender on Twitter, and some people don’t identify themselves by gender anyway. Further, we’re not aware of any ‘male’ or ‘female’ businesses or organizations.”

“Despite these factors, we believe there’s value to having more contextual signals, including gender, so that messages reach the most relevant audience,” she adds. “Just as marketers don’t want their ads to reach people who aren’t interested in their message, people don’t want to see mistargeted ads.”

Underwood says Twitter has a variety of public signals it can use to help it understand gender, without changing users’ profiles. Among them are profile names and the accounts a user follows.

Twitter says it has “strong confidence’ in the approach, and that marketers will find a variety of interesting uses for this kind of targeting, which now accompanies geo targeting, interest targeting and mobile targeting.

The feature simply lets you show ads based on certain demographic categories like age and gender. It’s kind of hard to believe advertisers have had to wait so long.

“Since 2011, we’ve been hard at work making this available to more advertisers,” says product manager Jon Krafcik. “Marketers have been getting great results. For example, Blue Nile used demographics in a campaign to reach potential engagement ring buyers and saw a click through rate of 10x higher than the U.S. national average for online display campaigns.”

“Demographic categories complement other AdWords targeting features, such as interest categories, remarketing and keyword contextual targeting,” says Krafcik. “The ultimate goal is to help you better refine your marketing message and reach the right audience with the right ad. For example, if you sell yoga gear and know that your core audience tends to be women between the ages of 25 and 34, you can set your campaign to show mostly to that audience, rather than showing your ads to people less likely to be interested in the product.”

The feature is now available in 39 countries within AdWords. It appears in the Display Network Tab as Age and Gender targeting, if it’s available in your area.

There are over 350 interest categories available to advertisers. They came in a two-level hierarchy. For example, under the first-level category Movies and Television, you can find sub-categories like Action and Adventure, Horror, Comedy, etc.

“By targeting people’s topical interests, you will be able to connect with a greater number of users and deliver tailored messages to people who are more likely to engage with your Tweets,” says Twitter product management director Kevin Weil. “When people discover offers and messages about the things they care about on Twitter, it’s good for both marketers and users.”

Advertisers can also specify certain usernames that are relevant to the campaign.

“Custom segments let you reach users with similar interests to that @​username’s followers; they do not let you specifically target the followers of that @​username,” explains Weil. “If you’re promoting your indie band’s next tour, you can create a custom audience by adding @​usernames of related bands, thus targeting users with the same taste in music. This new feature will help you reach beyond your followers and users with similar interests, and target the most relevant audience for your campaign.”

Twitter says that in testing, it has seen significantly increased audience reach for advertisers, and they’re seeing high engagement rates “across the board”.

In addition to the new targeting features, Twitter also announced that ti is lowering the minimum bid for all auctions to just a penny.

This ad news is the second major business-oriented announcement we’ve seen from Twitter this week. On Wednesday, the company announced the launch of the Certified Product Program.

Open Graph action spec ad targeting is expected to attract a new class of advertisers while also encouraging existing clients to spend more. The idea is attractive because it eliminates waste. Every dollar spent on delivering ads has more likelihood of resulting in a sale.

If you just purchased an Eric Church MP3, Ticketmaster could advertise an upcoming show to you and expect that you may actually by tickets to the event. It’s good for Ticketmaster and you. So if you express interest in something and you are purchasing items, than you’ll be sent more offers related to your behavior.

Of course the whole thing depends on Apps being used on Facebook. So far about 60 new partnered apps have launched but many more will have to follow suite for the concept to become more attractive to prospective advertisers.

It should take a couple of years for this new strategy to have a great effect on Facebook’s bottom line but the technology and the concept is just in time for the social networking site’s much anticipated IPO.

*Physical addresses for most of the country
*Phone numbers at the physical addresses
*Email Addresses for a large portion of the country (120 million addresses approx.)
*Up to date IP addresses

Beyond the contact information, data firms like Elect Strategies offer information on
age, gender, race, religion, income, education, ancestry, and what language is spoken in the household.

Combining this type of information with existing campaign list of who belongs to what party, how much they have contributed to a party in the past, and other party specific information, yields good results for fund raising. By linking this already rich information base with specific IP addresses could take it even when step further (targeted advertising to PC’s and smart phones).

While this strategy is not yet a standard of the campaigning world, it could quickly become a more prominent method.

[Source: ClickZ.COM]

Ben Lerer, who is the co-founder of lifestyle website Thrillist, explained to us that a traditional media company creates content and sells brand advertising against that content. Although the company has evolved from its traditional roots, he still believes his company is a media company since it has the assets from the traditional side, a trusted brand, and an opportunity to sell advertising. Thrillist, however, is taking this model a bit further with the recent introduction of Rewards, a platform that is similar to the popular daily deals offered by companies like Groupon. So wait, does that mean that Groupon is a media company?

Do you consider companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial media companies or advertising companies? Let us know.

According to Lerer, Groupon and LivingSocial are media companies in this new media era. He goes on to say that more traditional media companies will evolve toward similar models going forward, just as Thrillist has done. For his site, in particular, he said that moving in this direction was a “natural transition.”

In a nutshell, Rewards from Thrillist are “localized experiences and offers curated specifically to our audience,” which is young professional men. For example, a recent Reward was called “Strip & Strip” and included both a lap dance and steak. Other rewards have included drag racing adventures, all-you-can-eat beef jerky outings, and more.

“It’s less about the fact that you’re getting a great deal, and more about the fact that we’re packing up or packaging an offer in a way that makes it feel a lot more like content than a sale,” he said. “We’re making sure that we’re creating a really great experience where the user feels not just a loyalty toward the thrills/Rewards, but also toward the establishment.”

One of the most interesting ideas behind Thrillist’s model is that its Rewards, a.k.a. deals, are targeted to a specific group of people. While the Groupons and LivingSocials of the world have created an impressive business model around deals, Lerer believes that other companies will chip away at this model and create more targeted services.

“I believe that we can provide a certain kind of person a far better experience than a LivingSocial or a Groupon can,” he said. “I read Groupon and Groupon doesn’t feel like it’s written for me. It feels like it’s written for every resident of New York City.”

He does think that the more traditional media companies, such as news brands, will have a harder time embracing this new approach. They are used to making a clear distinction between church and state. Nonetheless, let’s not forget that very traditional news brand The New York Times is trying its hand at this model with the launch of its deals service earlier this year.

“There are so many different ways that brands can go and spend their dollars that if you’re not able to go and make sure that you’re taking advantage of the relationship that you have with your consumer… then you may wake up one day and realize that you don’t have as strong a business as you once thought you did,” said Lerer.

He admits that it takes a lot of work but believes that it is the direction of the future. Social media’s dramatic impact on the media industry will also likely play a big role in this shift. Ironically, with the exception of Foursquare, social media has not played as big of a role in Thrillist’s success as one might expect.

Lerer told us that he recognizes its importance and thinks the company could do more with it, but that the more traditional form of email marketing has proven to be more effective.

“We built Thrillist before social media existed, and so we’re really good at getting people to forward emails and to use email as sort of social media versus leveraging the traditional networks,” he said.

Do you see traditional media companies adopting this model? If so, how critical of a role would social media play?

The popularity of both of these types of services indicate that consumers want deals and coupons. Everyone likes to save, and now that people have had a taste of some great savings, they will likely come to expect it in the future.

Have you come to depend on coupons and daily deals? Let us know.

These services have created an entirely new advertising model for businesses to utilize. As a result, traditional advertising, such as with newspapers, is becoming much less relevant for brands. In a report from Forbes, the redemption rate of coupons in newspapers is only 0.6 percent.

According to Vijay Pullur, the CEO of social couponing service SocialTwist, brands can’t target consumers effectively in print advertising. Digitally speaking, brands are better able to target since users can click on their preferences, but he believes that there is a better way to target.

He is proposing a new form of targeting through a platform called Tell-a-Friend that involves social sharing. While it is true that users can share daily deals and coupons through social sites like Groupon, SocialTwist allows users to share in order to receive a better bargain. For instance, a user could turn a $1 coupon into a $3 coupon if he shares it with 3 other people.

Pullur tells us that brand engagement is much higher with this model since marketers can target a specific segment and message. For example, a mom would likely take a Huggies coupon and share it with other moms that would need it. The benefits are two-sided in this case, because the mom is able to save more, and Huggies was able to reach a particular fragment of its market.

“The targeting that the social coupons provide is tremendously better than any other mechanism because it goes through sort of a human filtering,” said Pullur.

He went on to say that SocialTwist’s social coupons receive a 50-80 percent redemption rate as well.

It is a bit surprising that this idea hasn’t yet taken off with daily deals or other popular couponing sites, but, chances are, it’s coming.