An example of a Kabam ad on the Twitter Publisher Network. (Credit:Twitter)
SAN FRANCISCO, April 17 (UPI) -- Twitter will now give marketers the option to place app install ads in its stream, a feature which has helped Facebook grow its mobile advertising revenue.
App install ads are exactly what they sound like, ads that urge a user to install a new game, messaging service or even nudge users to use an app they haven't used in a while. Advertisers will be able to take advantage of these ads, which will be carried both on Twitter and outside the microblogging service.
“This affords advertisers the ability to easily run on-Twitter app promotion via Promoted Tweets, while simultaneously running off-Twitter advertising via the MoPub Marketplace,” the company said in a blog post.
The new strategy, branded as "Publisher Network," will let advertisers access Twitter's newly-acquired company MoPub, a mobile-advertising exchange that Twitter bought last October. Together with Twitter's 241 million users, advertisers will now be able to reach more than 1.2 billion users, an audience similar to that of Facebook.
“This is the first connection between Twitter and MoPub and we are eager for other opportunities in the future,” said Kevin Weil, vice president of revenue products at Twitter. “MoPub has some serious scale.”
These kinds of ads have proven lucrative for Facebook's mobile advertising business, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioning them while speaking in January.
“We’re finding that people also really want to buy a lot of app install ads, and that’s grown incredibly quickly and is one of the best parts of the ad work that we did over the last year,” Zuckerberg said.
This bodes well for marketers who can now use a targeted tool and Twitter's behavioral data to single out groups of users and place relevant ads. The added bonus is the reach MoPub gives them beyond only Twitter's users.
[Twitter]
[The New York Times]
