Twitter Claims Promoted Tweets Lift Offline Sales By 12% For CPG Brands

Twitter announced today that it has launched an analytics tool that measures the impact of Promoted and organic Tweets on offline CPG sales.

Using the “offline sales impact” tool developed in conjunction with data analytics company Datalogix, Twitter measured organic and paid activity for 35 different CPG brands on the site, spanning a number of industries, including beverages, food, wellness, household products and alcohol.

According to the findings, Promoted Tweets resulted in people buying more: “Followers who are exposed to Promoted Tweets purchased 29 percent more from that brand than followers reached by organic Tweets alone.”

Not only did Promoted Tweets get people buying more, but the reports show engagements and impressions with a Promoted Tweet lifted offline sales as well. Comparing users who engaged with a Promoted Tweet to a statistically identical control group, Twitter discovered Promoted Tweets that generated engagements resulted in a 12 percent sales lift.

Promoted Tweets that earned only impressions — posts that were seen by users, but did not generate any engagement with a user — still averaged a two-percent lift in offline sales.

The reports revealed that a brand’s organic Tweets resulted in an eight-percent lift for offline sales, with users who were exposed to organic Tweets buying more from the brand than users who did not see the organic Tweets. The sales lift was three-fold for users who saw five or more organic Tweets over the measurement period.

“Many of our brands like Trident, Oreo, and Wheat Thins are very active in the Twittersphere and, with Twitter’s new offline sales impact capability, we will be able to measure the connections between our organic and paid Twitter activity and in-store sales,” said Mondelez International’s VP of global media and consumer engagement Bonin Bough, “This is a significant step in evaluating the power of real-time marketing.” Bough’s company was a beta-tester for Twitter’s new “offline sales impact” tool.

In response to privacy concerns, Twitter says that the company hired a “top-tier” consulting agency to review the process used for the “offline sales impact” capability. According to Twitter, the agency confirmed the following:

• Datalogix never sends Twitter information about the individual users’ purchases.
• The reports that Datalogix creates for advertisers include only aggregated anonymous information.
• The reports have minimum group sizes that are large enough that they do not reveal individual users’ purchases.
• Datalogix segregates the information it receives from Twitter and does not incorporate it into its existing data sets about individual users.
• Users can opt-out of Datalogix measurement studies at any time. If a user opts out, Datalogix does not send the user’s hashed email address to Twitter.

For now, Twitter’s new measurement tool is only available to CPG advertisers in the US, but the company says it hopes to offer the new capability to more verticals and geographies in the future. Advertisers are instructed to contact their account representative to begin using the “offline sales impact” reports.