Twitter Expands Targeting Options With Apps

Along with gaining appeal from its customers, Twitter is also striving to make advertisers more loyal, introducing new targeting options to meet their ever-growing granularity targeting appetites. Twitter is now letting app advertisers reach users based on the categories of apps already installed on their mobile devices. Advertisers can also combine the new feature with other targeting types such as keywords setting and choosing language and location of the targeted audience.

“One of the biggest priorities for mobile app marketers is to reach the people who are most likely to use and love their apps,” said Deepak Rao, product manager of revenue at Twitter, in a recent blog post. “With installed app category targeting, you can identify new audiences of high-quality users to target within your existing app category and in related app categories.”

For example, an advertiser that wants to drive installs for a cooking recipe app can select the Food & Drinks category to reach users who have recently installed similar apps. That same advertiser may know that the Food & Drinks app users also tend to use restaurant apps, so they can target the Travel category to connect with new people who are likely to be interested in their app. It is not always obvious to identify audiences more eager to use your app, but these hints may be useful in some cases.

Within the advertiser dashboard, Twitter is also releasing new reporting and analytics for installed app categories. The reports are available for all types of mobile app promotion campaigns, whether or not those campaigns used the new installed app category targeting feature.

The tracking program that consumers have on their mobile devices, Twitter started last year. Users who are not eager to take part in such a “tailored experience”, as Twitter calls it, can opt out of this feature. Twitter has promised not to keep records on user app data if they have previously opted out of “interest-based” ads.

Twitter said it only collects and updates the list of apps that users have installed, it does not collect in-app data. Besides optimizing its ad-targeting, Twitter uses collected data to improve “who to follow” suggestions on its service and to add Twitter accounts and other content to user timelines.

Oles Dzyub, Branded Content Manager at ComboApp