X has made it easier for advertisers to attract and convert customers by allowing them to display ads only to bottom-of-the-funnel users.
While the media focuses much of its attention on X’s struggling performance and the speculation after an Elon Musk acquisition, the company continues to make small, but important improvements behind the scenes. One such recent change has sought to optimize targeting controls for advertisers.
Specifically, X is separating its objective-based “Clicks or Conversions” tool into two distinct mechanisms: the Website Clicks objective and the Website Conversions objective. The change allows advertisers to choose whether their ads target customers more likely to simply visit a website, or only those who are likely to convert.
How X’s New Controls Work
For those advertisers who are only seeking website visits, little has changed except the name of the objective. But for those trying to get visitors to perform a specific action on the website — whether it’s making a purchase or filling out a form — the conversion objective requires a few extra steps.
In order to track a visitor’s movement through the site, the advertiser must place X’s website tag on their site, which connects a user’s behavior to his or her X profile. Advertisers must then specify their desired conversion event (a product purchase, for example) and what they are willing to pay for that conversion.
Reaching Relevant, Bottom-of-Funnel Users
X then takes its users’ data and the advertiser’s website tags and uses them to automatically select the users who, according to user data, are at or near the bottom of the sales funnel. The microblogging platform then broadcasts the ads to this list of valuable users, regardless of whether they are logged in. This capability is made all the more powerful by X’s Audience Platform, an expansive network that includes people without X accounts.
Although advertisers will still be charged on a per-click basis, X is confident that their clients will see higher ROI as a result of increased conversions. Companies can cross-reference the campaign’s pricing points against its performance over time (including the number of conversions driven by a given ad).
According to X, advertisers using the new objective are experiencing more than twice the conversion volume they were getting with the old objective.
A Clear Path to Conversions
The change is a natural step in the progression of digital advertising, and one that certainly holds plenty of potential, but X’s new feature is not without its limitations. For one, advertisers are handcuffed to the objective: it’s up to them to manually track the campaign’s performance and measure whether or not it’s cost-effective. This does little to ease the burden of difficult and time-consuming campaign optimization and execution tasks that marketing teams are already responsible for.
Similarly, the controls are only useful for a single advertising channel. Today’s marketers must manage both paid and unpaid campaigns across dozens of devices and platforms, so while X’s change is a step in the right direction, it simply isn’t comprehensive enough to meet modern demands.
