Experiment with Shared Ads on Twitter

We ran a couple shared ad experiments on Twitter in July and I thought you all might be interested in our findings. A shared ad is just an advertisement that promotes more than one business at the same time.

Twitter Experiment #1 - Optimize for Clicks

4 members each paid $80 and we created a single promoted tweet with info about each of them. The tweet tagged all 4 businesses and linked to a joint landing page we made which served as a launching pad for visitors to click through to their individual sites. Here are our takeaways from the $320 campaign, which we set up to optimize for clicks:

• $320 spent (4 members each paying $80)
• 292,411 total impressions
• 9,710 total engagements
• 3,783 link clicks
• 892 likes
• 120 RTs
• Each member gained ~40 followers.

I was one of the members that paid and I saw a 46% increase in sales in July over June for a 67.5% ROI. It's a short experiment so more comparisons would need to be made to draw long-term conclusions, but even half or a quarter of that ROI is still a respectable return on the ad spend.

We were really stoked about the 292k impressions. It's neat how combining funds like this helped each business get their brand in front of 4x more people than they would have been able to if they only bought $80 in ads for themselves. It's a powerful way to build brand awareness and increase name recognition.

Twitter Experiment #2 - Optimize for Followers

We self-funded a much smaller campaign simulating what would happen if we promoted 8 businesses in one tweet. This tweet was a pay-per-follower tweet and here's what we learned:

• Twitter only charges for the 1st action a user takes! Most people followed more than one account so we were able to get a super low cost per follower
• $21.75 spent
• 19,635 impressions
• 814 total engagements
• 232 followers (Each tagged follower earned about 25 new followers)
• 1.81% follow rate
• $0.09 cost per follow

The fact that Twitter only charges for the 1st action is the big takeaway from this experiment. This is a huge advantage for shared ads since engaged users take more than one action, but the group will only be charged once. That's important because it means each business is earning engagements while reaching 4x to 8x as many people as they would if they had to fund a solo campaign.

For every dollar you put in, you get $4 to $8 in advertising with shared advertising campaigns

Think about it. Our first campaign spread logos in front of 292k people. Yes, they had to share ad space but the second experiment proved engaged users take more than one action per post so these are people actively seeing your ad. It makes sense. You don't see people tagging competing businesses in a paid ad so it kind of slips around their ad blindness.

For the second campaign, we spent $21.75 to promote 8 accounts. That means each member would have paid $2.72 and earned 25 new followers. Imagine what would happen on a full-scale $640 campaign!

By the way, if you're curious how we design the shared landing pages we point our ads to, here's a sample screenshot:

What's next for Cohoist?

We're trying to decide if we're going to run a full-scale Twitter follower campaign next month or if we want to run shared ads on Reddit or Facebook. If you want your startup included in our next shared ad campaign, join us at cohoist.com and leave a comment below to let us know what kind of shared ads you want us to run next. We'll be sure to pass along what we learn here!