Twitter wants to massively broaden its audience reach by introducing ads for visitors who aren’t logged in to its service and actively tweeting.
A pilot project underway with select advertisers in the U.S., U.K., Japan and Australia will allow advertisers to display promoted tweets and promoted videos to everyone who visits Twitter, whether they’re logged in or not. Advertisers will be able to target the same audiences both on- and offline, using the same behavioural signals that advertisers use to segment logged-in users.
“We directly target the millions of Twitter users who don’t log into Twitter using the same social behavior targeting signals that you use today in the Twitter app,” revenue product manager Deepak Rao told AdExchanger.
“For users who are visiting Twitter but are not logged in, we look at what tweets they are consuming and what accounts they are interested in. This behavior gives us a great picture of who a person is and what they are interested in.”
Although Twitter’s userbase has flatlined at around 300 million monthly actives, the company says that it sees a much larger number of casual visitors that arrive via Google Search, direct links or embedded tweets. Including both logged-in and logged-out users, Twitter estimates its potential reach is actually around 800 million.
Twitter has been looking for ways to boost its reach so it can better compete for ad dollars with larger and faster-growing social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. In August, it announced that it was updating the Twitter Audience Platform in order extend social targeting across its MoPub mobile app network, a move that more than doubled its potential audience overnight.
Twitter’s offline userbase could be a big untapped advantage over its rivals, since most other social networks require users to be logged in to view content (or ads) and therefore don’t have any casual visitor traffic to speak of. Twitter’s been looking for ways to monetize its logged-out visitors since at least spring 2014.
The company hasn’t shared a lot of detail about how it’s tracking offline users, though it likely isn’t all that different than the way other publishers do (i.e. dropping cookies). For now, Twitter’s pilot will be limited to desktop, despite the majority of its visitors coming from mobile — which may be due to the difficulty of tracking logged-out users on mobile devices.
