Comics of the week #363

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Social alarm

A little busy

 

Fire in the sky

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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How to Find the Conversion Drivers of Your Website with the Funnel Report

There may be a lot of unanswered questions you have about some the big-picture questions with your website. Perhaps you’re asking:

Do demo requests or signups lead to more paying customers?

Does that product video lead to more signups?

Does the self-service onboarding plan lead to more customers?

Does offering a buy one, get one sale increase purchases?

In cases like this, there are options that a visitor can take to reach conversion. But, it’s often difficult for marketers to know which one has a better effect on the funnel.

The Kissmetrics Funnel Report answers these questions. Here’s how.

Finding the Biggest Conversion Drivers on Your Site

The traditional SaaS Funnel looks something like this:

• Visited site
• Signed up for a trial
• Used product
• Upgraded to paying

But what if a visitor could sign up or schedule a demo before using the product? The only solution to knowing which one converts better would be to create two separate funnels and compare the results. That is, until now.

The Kissmetrics Funnel Report allows you to add and/or statements in a step. So our hypothetical funnel could look like this:

• Visited site
• Signed up for a trial or Scheduled demo
• Used product
• Upgraded to paying

Here’s how to set that funnel up, and how to view the results:

View the Funnel Results

I’m not going to bore you with the details of setting up a Funnel Report. We’ve covered it before here and here. As long as you have your events and properties set up, creating a Funnel Report is as easy as putting shoes on. Let’s get straight into the results.

We’ll first look at the people that signed up:

And scheduled a demo:

Notice a difference?

Looks like signups drive significantly more product usage and customers (54 compared to 0). If this was your data, you’d know you should remove demo requests from the website so 100% of users go straight to signing up.

What’s Holding Back Your Marketing Site?

How many elements are on your website, seemingly harmless but actually detracting people from signing up or converting? They’re there, but you don’t know how they’re affecting the rest of your funnel.

Using the Or statements (like we did) in the Funnel Report is a great way to find the best performing elements on your site. Best of all, you don’t need to run an A/B test. All this data is already in Kissmetrics, and as long as you’ve been tracking it, you can see the performance.

Happy optimizing!

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

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5 years of Foundation: a look back

This month, ZURB celebrates the 5th birthday of its Foundation front-end framework. This popular framework is known for its responsive grid, CSS and HTML user-interface components, code snippets, and templates. What makes it stand out as well is that it’s an open-source project.

In a blog post earlier this month, Danny Codella, ZURB’s marketer, wrote about the occasion and the many ways that Foundation has changed the design and development world. Essentially, Foundation started its life merely as an internal ZURB style guide to help its team build websites faster and more efficiently. From there, it’s gone on to be a framework that’s currently used by thousands of brands and millions of users.

In the last five years, Foundation has become a favorite of some of the world’s best designers, developers, businesses and brands.

Here’s a quick recap of some of the most important firsts of Foundation’s young existence:

Responsiveness – What makes Foundation stand out is that it was the first open-source framework to embrace responsive design. This was a testament to Foundation’s and, more broadly, ZURB’s philosophy of being a trailblazer. A few years ago, when Ethan Marcotte was just beginning to explain what responsive design was, most companies were developing for fixed pixel widths. Foundation made it simpler for designers and developers to wrap their heads around responsive.

Semantic markup – HTML5 moved the web toward semantic markup. This permitted consistency between what people see in a webpage and what a text reader or web crawler can identify. This was a huge development in the last few years. Early adoption was slow, yet Foundation’s semantic approach to it helped balance things for developers.

Mobile-first – Now that mobile has overtaken desktop in the number of users, allowing for mobile-first design was really revolutionary. Foundation was instrumental in popularizing the mobile-first mentality of design, significant because it happened right before mobile really took off! The mobile-first approach was sorely needed, as designers and developers used to design for desktop screens first and then look at mobile as an afterthought, which, as some will remember, led to very bad user experiences on smaller devices.

SASS – Rebuilding with Sass showed the build process to one and all. This allowed designers and developers to take charge of this framework, bringing it from a mere theme that designers would build on top of to a truly customizable framework that’s ready for any design.

Accessibility – ZURB’s philosophy is that the web should be for everyone. Foundation reflected this belief in that its Foundation for Sites 6 was reworked to include accessibility standards and inform Foundation users how to make their sites more accessibility-friendly. In short, many are learning accessibility basics from this framework.

In the last five years, Foundation has become a favorite of some of the world’s best designers, developers, businesses and brands. This is due to Foundation’s role in being a trailblazer and moving the web forward this way.

Looking to the future, front-end development is a hot place to be. Browser tech is always advancing, and JavaScript frameworks are empowering developers to build more sophisticated applications. You can bet that Foundation is going to continue to be at the forefront of this movement.

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20 essential CSS tricks every designer should know

This one’s for the absolute beginners. Once you’ve learned how the box model works, and how to float those boxes, it’s time to get serious about your CSS. To that end, we’ve compiled a massive list of tips, tricks, techniques, and the occasional dirty hack to help you build the design you want.

CSS can get tricky, and you should too. And now, in no particular order, (almost) everything you’ll need to know:

Absolute positioning

If you want control over where an element lives on our website at all times, absolute positioning is the key to making this happen. If you think of your browser as one big bounding box, absolute positioning allows you to control exactly where in that box an element will stay. Use top, right, bottom and left, accompanied by a pixel value to control where an element stays.

position:absolute;
top:20px;
right:20px

The CSS above sets the position of an element to stay 20px from the top and right edges of your browser. You can also use absolute positioning inside of a div.

* + selector

The * enables you to select all elements of a particular selector. For example, if you used *p and then added CSS styles to that, it would do it to all elements in your document with a <p> tag. This makes it easy to target parts of your website globally.

Overriding all styles

This should be used sparingly, because if you do this for everything, you’re going to find yourself in trouble in the long run. However, if you want to override another CSS style for a specific element, use !important after the style in your css. For example, if I wanted the H2 headers in a specific section of my site to be red instead of blue, I would use the following CSS:

.section h2 { color:red !important; }

Centering

Centering is tricky, because it depends on what you’re trying to center. Let’s take a look at the CSS of items to be centered, based on content.

Text

Text is centered using the text-align:center;. If you want it to either side, use left or right instead of center.

Content

A div (or any other element) can be centered by adding the block property to it, and then using auto margins. The CSS would look like this:

#div1 {
    display: block;
    margin: auto;
    width: anything under 100% 
}

The reason I put “anything under 100%” for width is because if it was 100% wide, then if would be full-width and wouldn’t need centering. It is best to have a fixed width, like 60% or 550px, etc.

Vertical alignment (for one line of text)

You will use this in a CSS navigation menu, I can almost guarantee that. The key is to make the height of the menu and the line-height of the text the same. I see this technique a lot when I go back and edit existing websites for clients. Here’s an example:

.nav li{
    line-height:50px;
    height:50px;
}

Hover effects

This is used for buttons, text links, bock sections of your site, icons, and more. If you want something to change colors when someone hovers their mouse over it, use the same CSS, but add :hover to it and change the styling. Here’s an example:

.entry h2{
    font-size:36px;
    color:#000;
    font-weight:800;
}

.entry h2:hover{
    color:#f00;
}

What this does is it changes the color of your h2 tag from black to red when someone hovers over it. The great thing about using :hover is that you don’t have to declare the font-size or weight again, if it isn’t changing. It only changes what you specify.

Transition

For hover effects, like with menus or on images in your website, you don’t want colors snapping too quickly to the end result. You ideally want to ease the change in gradually, which is where the transition property comes into play.

.entry h2:hover{
    color:#f00;
    transition: all 0.3s ease;
}

This makes the change happen over .3 seconds, instead of just instantly snapping to red. This makes the hover effect more pleasing to the eye and less jarring.

Link states

These styles are missed by a lot of designers, and it really causes usability issues with your visitors. The :link pseudo-class controls all links that haven’t been clicked on yet. The :visited pseudo class handles the styling of all of the links you’ve already visited. This tells website visitors where they have already been on your site, and where they have yet to explore.

a:link { color: blue; }
a:visited { color: purple; }

Easily resize images to fit

Sometimes you get in a pinch where images need to fit a certain width, while scaling proportionally. An easy way to do this is to use max width to handle this. Here is an example:

img {
    max-width:100%;
    height:auto;
}

This means that the largest the image could ever be is 100%, and the height is automatically calculated, based on the image width. In some cases, you might have to also have to specify the width at 100%.

Control the elements of a section

Using the image example above, if you only want to target the images of a certain section, like your blog, use a class for the blog section, and combine it with the actual selector. This will enable you to select only the images of the blog section, and not other images, such as your logo, or social meia icons, or images in any other sections of your site, like the sidebar. Here’s how the CSS would look:

.blog img{
    max-width:100%;
    height:auto;
}

Direct children

I wish I’d known this when I first started out using CSS. This would have saved me so much time! Use > to select the direct children of an element. For example:

#footer > a

This will select and style all of the active link elements that are immediately under the Footer ID. It won’t select anything past the active element, or anything else contained in the footer, like plain text. This works great with top level navigation elements, too.

Specific Child Elements

Believe me, this is handy when you are styling lists. You just need to count how many items down the element is that you want to style and then apply that style.

li:nth-child(2) {
    font-weight:800;
    color: blue;
    text-style:underline;
}

The CSS above targets the second item in the list and makes it bold, underlined, and blue. Add an “n” after the number in parenthesis and you can target every 2nd list item. Imagine being able to style every other line in a table-style layout for easy reading. The CSS would be:

li:nth-child(2)

Apply CSS to multiple classes, or selectors

Let’s say you wanted to add an identical border around all images, the blog section and the sidebar. You don’t have to write out the same exact CSS 3 times. Just list those items out, separated by commas. Here is an example:

.blog, img, .sidebar {
    border: 1px solid #000;
}

Whether you’ve been a web designer for years, or you’re just starting out, learning how to build websites the right way can seem like a rocky, never-ending journey. Once you’ve narrowed down which languages you want to learn, you have to learn and refine your skills.

No matter what you learn, CSS is one of those essential, but daunting skills you have to master. It doesn’t have to be so difficult, though, especially if you know a few handy and lesser-known CSS techniques to get the job done.

box-sizing: border-box;

This is a favorite among many web designers, because it solves the problem of padding and layout issues. Basically, when you set a box to a specific width, and add padding to it, the padding adds to the size of the box. However, with box-sizing:border-box;, this is negated, and boxes stay the size they are meant to be.

:before

This CSS is a selector that allows you to choose a CSS element and insert content before every element with a specific class applied to it. Let’s say you had a website where you wanted specific text before every H2 tag. You would us this setup:

h2:before { 
    content: "Read: ";
    color: #F00;
}

This is extremely handy, especially if you are using an icon font. You can place icons before certain elements, and apply it globally.

:after

Like the :before selector, you can use :after to insert content globally on specific elements. A practical use would be adding “read more” after every excerpt on a blog. Here’s how you would do that.

p:after{ 
    content: " -Read more… ";
    color:#f00;
}

content

content is a CSS property that comes in handy when you need to insert an element that you want to be able to control. The most common use I’ve seen for this is to insert an icon from an icon font in a specific place. In the examples above, you can see that you have to wrap the text you want to insert in quotation marks.

CSS reset

Different browsers have default CSS settings, so it is a must to reset those, so you have an even, consistent playing field. Think of it as building a house, and whether you build on the side of a mountain, on a sandy beach, or on the middle of a wooded area, you want that foundation to be level.

This CSS reset method sets a standard base for all of your websites, giving them consistency in their CSS starting point. It removes unwanted borders, preset margins, padding, lines heights, styles on lists, etc. Eric Meyer created one that works well.

Drop caps

Everyone loves drop caps. It reminds us of the traditional printed book, and is a great way to start a page of content. That 1^st, large letter really grabs your attention. There’s an easy way to create a drop cap in css, and it’s by using the pseudo element: :first letter. Here’s an example :

p:first-letter{
    display:block;
    float:left;
    margin:3px;
    color:#f00;
    font-size:300%;
}

What this does is set the letter to 3x the size of the other letters. It sets 3px of space around the letter to prevent overlapping, and sets the color of the letter to red.

Force text to be all caps, all lowercase, or capitalized

It would be absurd to type an entire section in all caps. Imagine having to go back and fix that later when the format of the website changes, or it gets updated. Instead, use the following css styles to force text to a certain formatting. This css targets the h2 title tag.

• h2 { text-transform: uppercase; } – all caps
• h2 { text-transform: lowercase; } – all lowercase
• h2 { text-transform: capitalize; } – capitalizes the 1^st letter of each word.

Vertical screen height

Sometimes you want a section to fill the entire screen, no matter what the screen size is. You can control this with vh, or view height. The number before it is a percentage, so if you want it to fill 100% of the browser, you would set it to 100. You might set it to a value like 85% to accommodate a fixed navigation menu.

Create a class for the container and apply the amount of vh you want it to have. One thing you may need to tweak is the media query value for specific screens or orientations like phones in portrait mode. Imagine stretching a landscape image to fit portrait mode. That just wouldn’t look good.

.fullheight { height: 85vh; }

Style telephone links

If you have a link that calls a phone number when a user taps it on their phone, you may have trouble styling it with the traditional active link selector. Instead, use the following CSS:

a[href^=tel] {
    color: #FFF;
    text-decoration: none;
}

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The Ultimate Guide to Getting Sky-High Conversions From Twitter Ads

Will anyone actually click my ad and buy my product?

It’s a terrifying question, but an important one. Turns out that everyone (including you) wants to get more conversions from a Twitter ad campaign.

You spent countless hours writing lead magnets, creating landing pages and sales pages, and then later you set up a Twitter ad campaign to get some traffic.

While running ads is a great way to get some quick exposure, Twitter is a different ad platform. If you don’t understand the way it works, you might be wasting your money as well.

In today’s post I’ll be sharing some killer tips and resources to get sky-high conversions from Twitter.

So, would you like to know how to advertise on Twitter?

How about more advanced approaches to getting more followers, more leads, and more customers for your business?

But let me make it clear…

If there are secrets or special formulas that can magically unlock the power of Twitter advertising out there, I don’t know them.

What I do know, is exactly what the experts are doing — day in and day out.

And now, you will too.

But first let’s take a look at why you should invest in paid Twitter ads.

Why You Should Invest in Paid Twitter Ads

Twitter is a great social media channel for marketers, as it unofficially has 310 million monthly active users. Paid Twitter ads is an incredible way to complement your social media efforts. With Twitter advertising you can reach thousands of targeted customers and followers.

But why do you need to invest in paid twitter ads?

Organic Reach is Declining

Recently, Twitter made changes to their feed. Now, instead of getting all the recent tweets, Twitter only shows the tweets which they think are relevant to you.

Much like what Facebook did with their platform.

And just a few months ago, Twitter launched Engage which is for celebrities, influencers, and public figures that’ll curate the most popular tweets, mentions and replies.

This clearly shows that the reach of social media is plummeting day by day. Considering this scenario, Twitter paid ads is a way to go.

Adwords and Facebook Ad Costs Are Rising With Each Passing Day

Just last year, Search Engine Land reported a 20-25% increase in Google Adwords CPCs. More and more brands are investing in the same keywords which, of course, increase the competition and thus, the cost.

While Facebook ads were pretty cheap when they first started offering it, nowadays due to millions of advertisers, its platform is also becoming expensive.

For instance, Forbes reported a 21% increase in Facebook average ad pricing and the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) increased by an incredible 29% rate.

Considering both these reports, Twitter now looks like the promising ad channel. Facebook still beats Twitter on average cost per ad, but with some optimization and targeting options you can lower Twitter ad costs, even lower than Facebook.

Your Customers Spend a Ridiculous Amount of Time on Twitter

With each passing day, we’re getting more attracted towards social media. While Facebook is a beast with 1.2 billion monthly active users, Twitter’s 310 million monthly active users can’t be neglected.

According to DMR stats, 34% of active Twitter users log into it more than once in a day.

Looking at all these points, you’ll know that Twitter advertising is the way to go if you’re looking to make profits online.

Now let’s learn how to set-up the perfect Twitter ad campaign.

How to Setup the Perfect Twitter Ad Campaign

Twitter has a robust advertising platform. However, it is quite difficult to understand if you’re just starting out.

But don’t worry. Here’s how to setup your first Twitter ad campaign.

Step 1: Choose your primary objective

To advertise on Twitter you’ll need to log into your Twitter Ads account. For that head over to ads.twitter.com and enter your credentials.

Now, you’ll need to choose your primary objective. Whether you want to get more leads, more traffic, or just more followers.

Twitter has 6 types of campaigns to choose from, these are:

1. Followers
2. Website clicks or conversions
3. Tweet engagements
4. App install or re-engagements
5. Leads on Twitter
6. Video views

Choose a relevant campaign type and click on it.

Step 2: Select your targeting options

Once you’ve determined the campaign type, it’s time to set up the rest of the campaign. Name your ad campaign, choose all the relevant options, and select your targeting options.

Targeting is an extremely important feature for you to reach to your ideal customers. Twitter has 11 targeting options. These are:

1. Location
2. Gender
3. Languages
4. Devices, Platforms, and Carriers
5. Keywords
6. Followers
7. Interests
8. Tailored Audience
9. Behaviors
10. TV Targeting
11. Event Targeting

I recommend you choose relevant targeting options so you don’t end up wasting your time and money marketing to the wrong audience.

Step 3: Adjust your bid to make your campaign profitable

This is the place where most people get Twitter wrong.

Twitter sells its advertising via auction. That means the more you’re willing to pay, the more likely your ads will be shown, but if you set the bids too low, you’ll get no impressions.

So Twitter provides an option for that. It’s called automatic bidding.

This is how it works: you set a daily maximum budget and set the pricing to automatic bid, and Twitter will make sure your budget is spent very quickly. It might help you in winning auctions, but you don’t want to or have to win every auction.

So, avoid using automatic bid in most of the cases.

In fact, I recommend you to start with $2, then test with the ads, analyze the results and finally scale the campaign.

After doing all the steps, finally launch your campaign.

How to Make Your Campaign Go Viral

You’ve setup your first Twitter campaign. You now understand the platform and know its basics. You also know the way it works.

Now it’s time to optimize your campaign to make it viral. Here’s how:

1. Get High Quality Score to Lower Ad Clicks

First of all, you obviously don’t want to pay higher for ad clicks, when it’s possible to cut them down. Like Facebook and Google, Twitter also has it’s own quality score, which sometimes it refers to as “Quality Adjusted Bids”.

Larry Kim, the founder of Wordstream, actually found that the higher your engagement rate will be, the lower your ad will cost.

Here’s how Twitter determines quality adjusted bid:

1. Resonance: This is a metric to measure your engagement. Basically, the more likes, retweets, and comments you get, the higher your quality score.
2. Relevance: It checks whether a user is interested in your tweet.
3. Recency: This metric checks for the freshness of the tweet. If your tweet is fresh, then it’s going to get higher priority.

Here’s how to get a high quality adjusted bid:

Keep your tweets fresh
Like I already mentioned, Twitter keeps a check on the freshness of your tweet. That means Twitter is less likely to show your older ads. Here’s an example:

(Image Source)

This is a snapshot of Larry Kim’s Twitter ad dashboard. Notice how the impressions go down with each passing day.

Twitter wants to show fresh content to its users. So you’ll want to test different variations of each ad and consider replacing them with newer ads, instead of running the same ones for lengthy periods.

Promote your best stuff
The best possible way to get a high quality score and lower your ad costs is by promoting your best stuff i.e., the tweets which organically gained more exposure.

(Image Source)

This tweet by Larry Kim resulted in 1488 retweets and 1284 favorites.

Larry got these amazing results because his post was truly epic. So, when you write epic content like this:

• How do colors affect purchases?
• The Complete 101 List Building Strategies
• The Science of Social Timing Part 1: Social Networks

Your content has 100x better chance of going viral.

Narrow your audience
Relevance is another important metric in Twitter.

You don’t want to promote your content to the audience that shows little or no interest. Instead want to narrow your audience, target a smaller but precise audience who is interested in your content.

This not only helps get high conversions, but also helps you get higher engagement.

2. How to Find Your Best Content to Promote

Tweet engagement is a pretty important metric when it comes to advertising in Twitter. Not only does Twitter determine the pricing based on the tweet engagement but it also decides the exposure it’s going to get.

High engagement posts is the way to go in this scenario. Here’s how to find high engagement tweets:

1. Login to Twitter Analytics
2. Once you’re in there, click the tweets tab and then click export to export all your tweets

   

3. Twitter will take a few seconds to process it, depending on your account, then it will send a request to download CSV file
4. Open the file and sort the “Engagement Rate” tab by descending order

   

5. Now, the top tweets you get are the ones which are most engaging. This is where you should spend your dollars

Once you find your top engagment posts, head back to Twitter and start the advertising campaign for those top tweets.

3. Use Relevant Keywords to Narrow Down Your Audience

Keyword targeting is an amazing feature in Twitter that lets you to find the people based on the words and phrases they’ve tweeted or searched for on Twitter.

Each keyword has 6 options to match your ideal customer:

1. Broad Match: Broad match searches for all the tweets containing that keyword independent of the order.
2. Phrase Match: When you select phrase match, Twitter will search all the tweets that contains the keywords in exact order plus there may be other keywords present between those tweets.
3. Exact Match: It searches for the tweets with exact keywords in the exact order without any word in between.
4. Negative Match: Negative match will remove all the tweets with that keyword in any order.
5. Negative Phrase: Negative phrase will remove all the tweets that contains the keywords in the exact order.
6. Negative Exact: It removes all the tweets with exact keywords in the exact order without any keyword in between.

4. Use Behavior and Demographic Targeting Options to Boost Engagement

Like keyword targeting, Twitter offers behavior and demographic targeting which is a strong metric to find the relevant audience.

You can use behaviors and demographic targeting options to target the people who want to, and can afford to buy your products. Here’s how:

You can select their behavior like business type, industry, sales revenue to find the customers who might be interested in your offering. You can then select their demographic options like their income, education, and employment to find the customers who can afford to buy your products.

5. Create Tailored Audience for Each Buying Stage

Twitter also offers website tags, which is similar to the Facebook pixel. With this tag you can track different types of conversions for the customers visiting your audience, like:

• Site visit
• Purchase
• Download
• Sign up
• Custom

Once you’ve captured these visitors, you can then advertise to these customers in Twitter. And the best part?

You’ll get higher engagement for your tweets, meaning high quality score and low cost of the ads.

6. Leverage Twitter Lists For Best Results

Twitter lists is a great way to organize your followers, clients, influencers, and your team members. Many people know this feature but very few actually utilize it.

In Twitter advertising, Twitter lists is a great way to advertise. Here’s a great example of this:

Larry Kim wrote a blog post for WordStream.

He shared the post throughout his social media account, then promoted the post to the list of influencers using Twitter Ads.

(Image Source

Within 48 hours, the post picked 500+ press mentions and 100K visitors. All of this with just a $50 budget and 10 minutes of campaign setup.

Pretty cool, right?

Your results may vary.

7. Upload Your Email List to Create Your Own Audience

In Twitter, you can upload your email list to create your own list of audiences. With this feature, you can advertise to your email subscribers.

This is a great feature especially when you want to nurture your leads or promote your products. Here’s how to get started:

1. Head over to Twitter ads. Select Tools and click audience manager.

   

2. Click create new audience. Then, select upload your own list.

   

3. Fill out all the information, upload your email list and click create list audience.

This list audience is extremely beneficial in Twitter. You can promote your blog posts, lead magnets, and promote your products.

8. Use Retargeting to Promote Your Content

Remarketing is an incredible way to advertise to your website visitors or your email subscribers. In Twitter, you can either use promoted tweets, Twitter cards, or promoted tweets.

All of them gives you a great option to get more exposure. To use retargeting, here’s what you should do:

1. You must upload your email list to retarget your email subscribers
2. You must create a website tag and install it in your website

I recommend you set up a website tag and install it. It’s buried deep in Twitter, but it’s actually the first thing you should do before running any ad. Here’s how to generate a Website tag:

Login to Twitter Ads. Then, click tools, followed by conversion tracking.

Next up, agree to the Terms and Conditions and then click generate website tag for conversions.

In the next page you’ll get the website tag. Install the tag in your website to setup conversion tracking.

Once done, you can advertise to your website visitors based on their behaviours and their purchase.

Measure your Strategy’s Success

You’ve created your first ad. You’ve also optimized your ad to get sky-high conversions. Now, finally it’s time to analyze your ad’s performance and tweak it, if needed.

Let’s start…

1. Test With the Different Variations of the Same Ad

Twitter loves fresh tweets and that’s the reason it gives high preference to fresh tweets. You don’t want to continue running your old ads; instead, you want to create new variations and test with them.

Here are some ideas to test your ads:

• Test changing the headline of your tweet
• Test changing the call-to-action button copy
• Try moving the URL to the front or in the center of your tweet
• Add relevant hashtags to your tweet, to see if it helps
• Try adding, removing, or changing the image

2. Use UTM Parameters

UTM parameters are simply the tags to measure your online marketing campaigns inside Google Analytics or Kissmetrics.

It helps you analyse and measure your online marketing efforts.

For instance, if you’re offering an eBook and want to track the number of users who visited the landing page from your Twitter ad campaign, then you simply ad this tag to your URL.

http://ift.tt/2dPFwEU

Then, you can track every conversion in Kissmetrics. But, it’s quite a headache to create URL every time you create a new ad. For this, you can use Google’s URL Builder, which does a pretty decent job in generating UTM tags for your URL.

3. Analyze, Tweak, Repeat

Finally, it’s time to measure your ad performance.

(Image Source)

Pay close attention to your Twitter Ad dashboard, view your engagement rate, clicks, replies and likes.

Make sure to double check this data with Google Analytics or Kissmetrics (a more robust option). This will help you find the actual number of clicks you’re generating.

With these results, check which campaigns are working and which aren’t. Delete the campaigns that aren’t working and double down on the stuff that’s working.

Conclusion

Twitter ads can be profitable; they can help you generate great ROI. But you must allocate your time to test with the platform.

Remember, Twitter can be misleading (hello, automatic bid) and at times their suggestions won’t work for you. Forget everything that Twitter told you, forget the best practices they told you.

Instead go by this approach, avoid the major pitfalls that Twitter offers and you’ll get incredible ROI from Twitter ads.

About the Author: Aman Thakur shows marketers and bloggers, simple and effective ways to build their mailing list super-fast. Download his exclusive bonus 101 list building strategies to grow your email list. A writer by day and a reader by night, he can be found online tweeting about marketing, or watching Cricket matches.

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