Promoted Tweets drive offline sales for CPG brands

Even in our increasingly online world, the vast majority of retail sales still happen offline — according to U.S. Census Bureau research, more than 94 percent of retail activity still happens in the physical world. This presents an interesting challenge when trying to measure the impact of marketers’ online advertising.

In partnership with Datalogix (DLX), a company that specializes in measuring the offline impact of online ads, we’re announcing a new capability we call “offline sales impact” to answer that challenge. Starting today, we can now quantify the impact of Promoted and organic Tweets on offline sales for consumer packaged goods (CPG) businesses in the United States.

New measurement shows both organic and Promoted Tweets drive offline sales lift for CPG brands

Three key results from our initial tests

We asked Datalogix to run studies for 35 brands to measure the impact of organic and paid Twitter activity on offline sales. These brands spanned multiple CPG categories, including, beverages, food, wellness, household products, and alcohol. Here’s what we learned:

1. Engagement drives greater in-store sales. Users who engaged with a brand’s Promoted Tweets purchased more from that brand than a statistically identical control group, resulting in an 12 percent average sales lift. The results also demonstrate a sales lift among users who simply viewed the Promoted Tweets without engaging, averaging a 2% lift in sales. This proves that both impressions and engagements from Promoted Tweets are valuable to a brand.

2. Brands’ organic Tweets drive sales. Users exposed to a brand’s organic Tweets bought more from that brand than those who were not exposed, producing a 8 percent average sales lift. This lift was nearly 3x greater among users who saw 5 or more organic Tweets over the measurement period. The implication of this finding is that brands who actively build their follower base and regularly tweet to their followers can see an increase in offline sales.

3. Followers who see Promoted Tweets buy more. Beyond generating sales lifts by reaching followers organically, Promoted Tweets augment the sales impact. Followers who are exposed to Promoted Tweets purchased 29 percent more from that brand than followers reached by organic Tweets alone.

One of our early beta test partners for offline sales impact was Mondelez International, which runs a portfolio of consumer brands like @Oreo, @WheatThins, and @TridentGum. Mondelez’s Bonin Bough, VP of Global Media and Consumer Engagement, comments:

“Twitter’s study is highly valuable to us because it brings social activity even closer to measurable sales impact. Many of our brands like Trident, Oreo, and Wheat Thins are very active in the Twittersphere and, with Twitter’s new offline sales impact capability, we will be able to measure the connections between our organic and paid Twitter activity and in-store sales. This is a significant step in evaluating the power of real-time marketing.”

How we protect user privacy

We’ve taken extra steps to design our offline sales impact capability with privacy in mind. Our process matches unreadable scrambles, called hashes, of email addresses to generate aggregated anonymous reports for advertisers. We hired a top-tier consulting firm to perform an independent review of these practices. The firm confirmed that:

• Datalogix never sends Twitter information about individual users’ purchases.
• The reports that Datalogix creates for advertisers include only aggregated anonymous information.
• The reports have minimum group sizes that are large enough that they do not reveal individual users’ purchases.
• Datalogix segregates the information it receives from Twitter and does not incorporate it into its existing data sets about individual users.
• Users can opt out of Datalogix measurement studies at anytime. If a user opts out, Datalogix does not send the user’s hashed email address to Twitter.

For more information on our process and user privacy, please visit this Help Center page.

We hope to offer this capability to more verticals and more geographies in the future. If you’re a current CPG advertiser in the U.S. and are interested in learning how to qualify for an offline sales impact study, please contact your account representative.

To begin advertising on Twitter, click here to get started.

Posted by Ameet Ranadive (@ameet)
Product Manager, Revenue