Twitter provides data sets consisting of users who've been
exposed to a given brand's tweets and ones who haven't to
Datalogix, which has a vast repository of purchase data. It can
then use email matching to track how many people in those groups
have recently purchased the brand's product.
Thirty-five brands in categories spanning beverages, food,
wellness, household products and alcohol participated in a test
Twitter and Datalogix recently wrapped up, according to Ameet
Ranadive, a product manager for Twitter's revenue team. Mondelez
International and its brands Oreo, Wheat Thin and Trident gum were
among them. He declined to say how many users were part of the
test.
The idea going forward is to offer the service -- which the
marketers in the test group didn't pay for -- more widely to CPG
advertisers. Twitter is currently only making it available to a
limited set of clients, Mr. Ranadive said.
According to the Datalogix findings, Twitter users who've
interacted with the brands' promoted tweets -- meaning they've
taken an action like replying to it or retweeting it -- purchased
12% more of the brands' products in stores than the control group.
Users who had merely seen a promoted tweet -- which comes at no
cost to advertisers, since Twitter doesn't charge for impressions
-- purchased 2% more.
Lastly, Twitter users who had seen the brands' organic tweets
purchased 8% more than the control group. And those who saw five or
more organic tweets in the measurement period purchased three times
as much as the baseline of users who had been exposed. However,
causation seems harder to pin down in this instance, since the
people exposed to organic tweets from brands are voluntarily
following them, which makes them likelier to be brand
loyalists.
Mr. Ranadive observed that Twitter started its Datalogix
measurement program with CPGs because they tend to be among the
more active marketers on Twitter, but that it ultimately plans to
extend it to other categories like automotive.
"[CPGs] invest pretty heavily in organic tweets," he said.
"[And] for the first time we're able to show that acquiring
followers and tweeting to them enhances sales."