• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 25, 2022

Twitter on Tuesday introduced improvements to its ad capabilities, building off the company’s 2021 product roadmap to improve performance advertising and measurement on the platform in 2022.

The company is on track to rid its portfolio of software that might sidetrack its progress in an effort to further develop and improve on its owned-and-operated products. The idea is to provide advertisers with features that allow them to measure success.

Early this month, Twitter completed the sale of its mobile ad platform, MoPub, to the mobile marketing software provider AppLovin for $1.05 billion in cash.

Twitter's three new free products — Site Visits Optimization, Aggregated Measurement, and Events Manager — which Twitter calls “foundational updates,” are aimed at improving campaign performance to drive traffic to a company’s website.

The products support the measurement and the optimization solutions launched in 2021.

Site Visits Optimization is a new optimization goal within Website Traffic, renamed today from Website Click & Conversion. It is dedicated to finding and serving ads to audiences most likely to visit the brand’s website.

When enabling the Twitter Website tag, the technology can track actions made on an advertiser's website and attribute them to the Twitter ads campaigns.

In early tests with advertisers looking to increase traffic to their websites, Site Visits Optimization outperformed existing offerings and saw an average lower cost-per-site-visit of 31%. 

Building off of the updates made to improve our mid-funnel offerings, our teams will be focused on the development of new product features that will expand on ad conversions (for example, adding items to a cart or driving purchases) to better help you drive your business outcomes. 

Twitter also introduced attribution with Aggregated Measurement, intended to provide conversion metrics by counting events in aggregate for audiences that opted out of tracking on iOS devices. 

In the Twitter Ads Manager Reporting, advertisers can see an aggregated view of site metrics and conversion events to gain a complete view of campaign results. Twitter says early tests show a 31% increase in attributable Site Visit Conversions in Twitter Ads Manager, across advertiser campaigns.

Events Manager will become the central hub for advertisers to manage Twitter Website Tag, as well as its web-based conversion events. It aims to give advertisers more tools to manage tracking ad campaigns. 

The update -- which focuses on improving diagnostic and measurement capabilities with privacy enhancements -- includes an interface that increases clarity when setting up the Twitter Website Tag. It also provides prompts to provide guidance on how to set up conversion events, and an ability to see updates on the tracking status of conversion events.