I received a $50 credit to play around with Twitter Advertising, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Instead of using the basic ad interface I switched to advanced Ads because it opens the door to a ton of features and reporting not available in the basic.
Naturally, since I'm not selling any products, I figured I'd just promote my account. Here are some of the interesting screenshots. Note, I'm a contributor to Web Analytics World, and a lot of what I write/tweet about involves search engines, so that explains why I chose the 2 accounts to target. Also note, because some of the folks that follow me are friends/family or just people I've met, I chose not to target people like my followers.
The impression graph is pretty interesting; comparing that and the follow graph (not attached because it's only 7 followers), the first thing I'd do is start dayparting my advertising to hit the most relevant times of days to get followers. But Twitter doesn't have that option, yet.
This section of the reporting is pretty interesting; you get a sense of what interests people are into. I chose NOT to target by interest because I felt people that followed the 2 accounts was enough targeting for me.
I'm really loving the advanced advertising dashboard in Twitter, but the real reason to switch to advanced? Analytics! Check this out! This shows engagement by post, not just promoted posts! Look at the second tweet: it tells you how many clicks that link had. This is EXCELLENT if you want to measure clickthrough on Twitter, even without using UTM tracking on your own website. And obviously if you're linking to another site you can finally know how many people clicked without having to go out to Bit.ly. (You ARE using a link shortener right? Right?!)
Hey, what about other people that post links to my website?! Well, they've got you covered! Just add a small line of code to your header to confirm you're the owner (no different that Google Webmaster tools) and voila, you get an awesome graph showing anyone that linked to your site in their Tweet.
That's it! Enjoy it folks!