Twitter’s Promoted Tweet ad unit leads consumers to spend more offline, according to a new report by data platform provider Datalogix commissioned by Twitter. A Promoted Tweet is an ad unit that enables marketers to pay to increase the prominence of a post.
Datalogix examined 35 consumer packaged goods brands—it included companies that sell food, household products and alcohol—in the report to measure the impact of organic and paid Twitter posts, commonly called tweets. The data platform provider gathers consumer offline purchasing data from retailers’ loyalty cards.
The report found that consumers who interacted with a brand’s Promoted Tweets—by retweeting, replying or sharing the post—spent 12% more on the brand’s products in bricks-and-mortar stores than did a control group. Shoppers who saw a brand’s Promoted Tweets while scrolling through their timelines spent 2% more than those in the control group. The timeline is the first page a Twitter user sees when logging on to the microblogging service.
“This proves that both impressions and engagements from Promoted Tweets are valuable to a brand,” wrote Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s product manager, revenue, in a blog post.
Datalogix also found that shoppers who saw a brand’s organic tweets—that is, those posts that the brand didn’t pay to promote—bought 8% more from that brand than those who did not see the posts.
Still, those who see Promoted Tweets buy 29% more than those who only see a brand’s organic posts. In part, that’s because Promoted Tweets guarantee a brand a high position in shoppers’ timelines, whereas organic posts appear in chronological order.
Twitter says it took “extra steps” to design the study so that it wouldn’t have to exchange any personal information about its users with Datalogix. It used “hashing technology,” which takes an e-mail address or other information and converts it into a string of numbers and letters that cannot be reversed to recreate the original information. It then matches up those strings with hashed information provided by Datalogix. Datalogix, Twitter says, never sent Twitter information about individual shoppers’ purchase.