Twitter Celebrates 1 Year Of Mobile App Promotion Ads With New Video Units And Bidding Options

It was just over a year ago that Twitter started a broad rollout of its mobile app promotion ads. It’s marking the occasion with a blog post discussing how the program is going and announcing some new features.

App install ads have been a notable success for Facebook, and they’re turning into a broader battle between the big digital media companies.

In Twitter’s case, app promotion ads can either take users to an app download page or deep link to a specific page within the app. (On the latter front, Twitter’s helped by its acquisition of mobile ad retargeting startup TapCommerce, which now reaches 40 billion ad impressions daily.)

Richard Alfonsi, the company’s vice president of global online sales, suggested that Twitter is a particularly appropriate place for app install ads, since “the user mindset on Twitter is to discover something new,” and since 80 percent of its monthly active users are on mobile.

twitter video app ad

The new features, which are still in beta testing, include the ability to advertise your app with a video — Twitter says this will offer “an immersive experience that drives higher quality app installs.” Advertisers will also be able to prioritize installs in their ad buying, either by paying on a cost-per-install basis, or through a bidding process that optimizes for installs while paying cost-per-click. The company also says it will be expanding the capabilities for advertisers to use Twitter’s targeting for ads in partner apps.

The company doesn’t break out app promotion revenue when it shares its broader mobile ad numbers, and today’s post is less focused on overall trends and more on praise from individual advertisers like Postmates, Lyft and Comedy Central. For example, Lyft says Twitter ads perform 3x more effectively than those on other social media sites and says Twitter has become “our go-to channel for social media marketing.”