Coke boasts "phenomenal" engagement from Twitter ads

Coca-Cola’s digital marketing chief said the company was seeing “phenomenal” results from its advertising campaign on Twitter.

In a promising review of the microblogging network’s nascent advertising program, Carol Kruse, a top executive at the beverage company, said that its initial Promoted Tweet ad received 86 million impressions in its first 24 hours and drew an engagement rate of 6 percent, compared to the typical 0.02 percent clickthrough rate that mosts ads see.

Coke was also the second company behind Disney to buy a Promoted Trend ad (pictured right), which is a sponsored space below the network’s top 10 trending topics that links to a search results page.

“The amount of impressions in such a short period of time around our whole World Cup campaign, to me it was a phenomenal time,” Kruse, the company’s vice president for global interactive marketing, told the Financial Times. “It made this emotional connection at the time, it was great.”

She added that the campaign wasn’t expensive compared to other types of online advertising.

While Kruse said engagement for the ad was strong, it’s important to note that Twitter measures interaction in a fundamentally different way than other platforms.

While advertising-dependent Internet companies typically charge marketers based on impressions or clicks, Twitter has a unique metric called “Resonance” that measures whether an ad is popular with users. It considers factors like retweets, replies, clicks on tagged search terms within posts, avatar clicks, link clicks, and views after a retweet, although the exact secret sauce isn’t public. If an ad doesn’t perform well, Twitter will drop it to preserve the user experience.

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Tags: online advertising, Social Media