Twitter is letting CPG advertisers link their ‘Promoted’ ad placements to offline sales, courtesy of Datalogix. The offering has strong echoes of Facebook’s year-old POS conversion-tracking relationship with Datalogix.
Twitter has already run tests with 35 brands using the “offline sales lift” feature to weigh the impact of online engagement with in-store transactions. Advertisers include Oreo’s parent company, Mondelez International
“Everybody knew there was great brand value in having people retweet your posts and things like that, but the question always was, ‘Does it drive in-store sales?’” said Eric Roza, CEO of Datalogix. “What we found across 35 or so brand campaigns was that more than 90% of campaigns showed just this.”
The CPG companies involved so far sell everything from beverages to household products. Results showed that when Twitter users engaged with Promoted Tweets, there was, on average, a 12% lift in offline sales. Users who viewed a Promoted Tweet, but who did not necessarily engage with it, still showed 2% sales increases.
So, how does it work? Based on an exchange of information from Twitter and Datalogix user databases, the companies can “swap” hashed IDs, generate a match and create a key so both sides can talk to one another in a way that personally identifiable information is not disclosed, Datalogix says.
“That’s how we can get the impression data from them and, on the other side, we have relationships with about 1,500 different retailers and there, we have more traditional database marketing and CRM matches,” Roza added.
Datalogix has supported conversion tracking for Facebook advertisers for going on a year.
When asked how Twitter’s developing march toward monetization compares with its extensive work with Facebook, Roza said, “They’ve been thoughtful about delivering on what makes [them] unique, even to the point of structuring – ‘What are the ad units there?’ ‘How do you pay for them?’ ‘What kinds of messaging is going to work and not work?’”
In a blog post, Twitter product manager Ameet Ranadive also stressed users’ ability to opt out. He said Datalogix only aggregates anonymous user data and that data received from Twitter is not integrated into existing individual user data sets.
Meanwhile, Twitter continues its apparent push into data-driven ad products, with its delving into website retargeting and email database matching in early July. Twitter’s also debuted things like lead capture forms for marketers in-stream.
