Twitter Expands Keyword Targeting Choices For Promoted Tweets

Advertisers using Twitter’s Promoted Tweets product have new keyword options to target their tweets in Twitter’s search results, along with a new tool to import keywords from other online ad platforms.

The company is launching three keyword matching options, along with the ability to use negative keywords, too. Search marketers will be familiar with the keyword matching options:

• exact match
• phrase match
• keyword match

Using negative keywords acts similarly to other platforms; advertisers can indicate keywords that they don’t want their ads appearing next to in Twitter search results.

Twitter also says it’s going to start automatically matching Promoted Tweets to trending topics. Here’s the example scenario from Twitter’s blog post:

For example, if a celebrity’s pregnancy news starts trending, and you’re a retailer of baby clothing, your Promoted Tweet may be entered into the auction for that trending search.

That seems like something advertisers will have to watch carefully. I don’t think that a baby clothing retailer will necessarily see much ROI from having a promoted tweet showing up when a Kardashian gets pregnant; does anyone really think, Kim Kardashian is pregnant. I better go buy my child some new baby clothes. Twitter says this matching option will be turned on by default in new campaigns.

There’s also a new tool for importing keywords from other online advertising platforms, i.e. Google AdWords and Bing Ads. The screenshot is above. Twitter says the tool “accepts exported keyword lists from other search advertising platforms or simple cut-and-paste from a document.”

All of these new targeting options are available today in Twitter’s advertising dashboard.