1. TWITTER WEBSITE CARDS
Date: June 17, 2015
To: Alisa Simmons
From: Danielle Mukamal
Subject: Information for the potential expansion of Global Trade Watch into paid Website Cards
on Twitter
The purpose of this memo is to provide a brief overview of the purpose of a website card, its
various options, and their helpfulness in order to increase clicks.
What are website cards?
Website cards are a method of targeting an audience and giving them a quick way to access your
website. They are larger and more engaging than a standard tweet. It features a large image
attached to your tweet, but clicking on it will send users to your landing page (a page on the
website designed to receive inbound traffic from your profile on twitter). They strongly
recommend a landing page, but I would just link it to the GTW homepage. There are more
opinions here.
What are the various options?
Twitter has 9 or so different “cards” (e.g. for linking to download an app) but the website one is
really the only one that’s applicable. It has one basic template:
- Horizontal image
- Space for a bit of copy
- Link to your site
- Call-to-action button (e.g. Read More)
They recommend writing several different cards to see which ones generate the most
engagement at the lowest cost. They are priced by cost-per-click, so you only pay when someone
clicks through to your site. You can set a daily and total budget for the campaign. The audience
we are targeting will change the language of the ad, so it could be a good way to determine what
part of the audience we are reaching
How helpful is it to use the website cards?
The advantages include:
- Increases web clicks by 43% on average, according to Twitter
- Improves both cost per click (CPC) and click through rate (CTR)
- Adds more content about the site in the form of a large image and more information,
which leads to a higher click-through rate
- More info here.
What are people saying about it?
There are not a lot of reviews about it—most websites seem to discuss how to do it instead of
evaluating its effectiveness.