Twitter just announced a partnership with Nielsen that should give brands a new way to measure the impact of their advertising campaigns.
Apparently, in the same way that you now see Promoted Tweets in your tweet stream, you might also start seeing surveys from the @TwitterSurveys account, asking you to answer a few questions. These surveys will appear in both mobile and desktop. The company writes:
This is a native experience for the user, and we believe it will give brands better insights to determine purchase intent, overall awareness, and other advertising metrics and analytics that can lead to greater engagement on Twitter.
In other words, these surveys will measure things like users’ awareness of a company or brand or their willingness to purchase a product. So instead of just telling advertisers that their campaigns resulted in a certain number of retweets and favorites, and other Twitter-specific metrics, Twitter can also give them a more traditional set of measurements around brand impact. A spokesperson tells me that advertisers will be able to target surveys similar to the ways they target Promoted Tweets, with the additional capability to compare surveys of people who have and haven’t seen an ad.
One of the big themes whenever Twitter talks about its ads is the fact that they have to offer content that users engage with. When it comes to surveys, Twitter’s spokesperson says, “Engagement will definitely be something we watch, but we’ve seen engagement comparable to standard Promoted Tweet campaigns thus far.”
Twitter is working with a small set of initial advertisers, with plans for a bigger roll out next year.