Twitter makes a play for more ad dollars as it compares its audience size to Facebook
Twitter’s CFO Anthony Noto believes that the social network may have an audience that’s “pretty comparable” to Facebook’s 1.4 billion users as he makes his claim for why advertisers should spend on the site.
Speaking at Deutsche Bank’s Technology Brokers Conference on Wednesday (16 September), Noto said that while Twitter only has 300 million active monthly users, if you include other measurements such as people that see tweets on external websites or through searching on Google that number could be much higher.
“We have an audience, depending on how you measure it, that’s pretty comparable [to Facebook]. We have other audience numbers that no one talks about and when you add those up it’s a big number, in fact in some scenarios you could argue it’s bigger,” he explained.
Noto, who is currently in charge of marketing while Twitter hunts for a CMO, believes that reach gives advertisers much bigger reach than they realise and said Twitter is working on educating marketers on the scale of its audience.
“That resonates with advertisers when we talk about [it] on a per market basis. It doesn’t just talk about the log-ins, it talks about the broader audience,” he added.
Twitter is also working on improving attribution for advertising on its site as it looks to attract more direct response advertisers, not just brand dollars. Noto said Twitter has done a “great job” with attribution on its own site but admitted it has struggled with third-party attribution.
“There were some direct response advertisers that spend a lot of money with us on the branded side of the business, but no money on the direct response side because it’s a principle for them to have third party attribution,” he explained.
That is why Twitter signed a deal with Google’s DoubleClick in July. While Noto said third-party attribution is still some way off, he hopes Twitter is now on a journey that will allow it to stake a claim in brand sales even if a consumer didn’t purchase directly through an ad on Twitter.
“If someone on Twitter chooses not to buy a product after being served an ad, it gets no attribution for having built the brand awareness of that product or them buying it days later,” he said.
“It’s why the deal [with Doubleclick] was struck, to have third-party attribution from Google that spans the entire customer journey. But getting this feedback is not just a simple case of flicking on a switch; there needs to be a certain amount of volume and certain amount of data to be able to compete with other platforms that have been on there for years.”
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