14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is just starting to experiment with ads on the site, but if Coca-Cola’s experience is any indication, the site may have a great product on its hands. The drinks company recently bought the second ever promoted trend ad on Twitter and the results have been “phenomenal,” the company says. The numbers speak for themselves, the ad saw 86 million impressions in the first 24 hours and had an impressive engage rate.
“The amount of impressions in such a short period of time around our whole World Cup campaign, to me it was a phenomenal time,” Carol Kruse, VP of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola, told the Financial Times. “It made this emotional connection at the time, it was great.”
With 86 million views of its ad in just one day, it’s clear that Twitter is seeing a lot of traffic. But it looks like the ad format itself, which plays into Twitter existing features, may be a winner as it drove 6 percent of the people viewing it to click on the ad. As anyone in web advertising would tell you, that number is pretty much unheard of and regular ads get a click rate of about 0.02 percent.
Twitter has been looking at ways to start making money for more than a year now. Regular ads were never an option, but Twitter came up with the idea of integrating the ads with the features people already used on the site. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn’t interfere with the regular activities.
The first step was Promoted Tweets which were introduced in April. Promoted Tweets aren’t necessarily ads since they’re regular tweets which the advertisers choose to highlight on top of the search results. The tweets can come from the advertisers or, indeed, anyone else.
The second phase was the introduction of Promoted Trends. Similar in concept to Promoted Tweets, advertisers would pay to have an ad listed with the Trending Topics on the homepage and on the individual profile pages. Disney bought the first Promoted Trend ad for Toy Story 3, but it hasn’t provided an account of how successful it might have proved.