Small Twitter Advertisers Can Now Target Ads Like Big Brands (& Use The Advanced Interface)

Equality has arrived in Twitter’s advertising system.

The company has announced that small, self-serve advertisers now have access to the same “advanced” dashboard as bigger spenders, and can also target ads using the same options as big brands. These are things that Twitter has offered its bigger advertisers for some time now, but weren’t offered to the little guys until today.

Little advertisers logging in today will see the “Switch to Advanced” option at the top of the dashboard. And, whether they use that or not, they’ll have access to new targeting options that only big advertisers could use before. They can target:

• “users with the same interests as followers of @usernames”
• based on “a wide-ranging list of over 350 interest categories”
• based on specific devices and platforms
• by gender

Smaller advertisers previously had very limited targeting options available in the basic ad dashboard.

Switching to the advanced dashboard is a permanent choice. Twitter warns that you can’t try it out and change your mind — once you go advanced, you never go back. The dashboard includes a comparison chart to help smaller advertisers decide which dashboard is a better fit.

The advanced dashboard offers deeper controls and analytics and doesn’t require any minimum spend. A lot of advertisers will want to upgrade, but it’s a good move to give self-serve advertisers the option to use it or not. It might be more powerful and complex than some of them need.