May 27, 20152 min read

First Look: Twitter Upgrades Analytics With Audience Insights

Twitter today launched an upgrade to its analytics tool, offering marketers more information about audiences on the social communications network.

Called “Audience insights,” the new feature drills into demographics, interests, lifestyle, consumer purchasing behavior, television-viewing preferences and mobile carrier and device usage. Twitter matches its data with consumer information from its Marketing Platform Partners, including Datalogix. That information, aggregated to protect user privacy, is currently only available for U.S. Twitter users. Twitter said it plans to roll it out more broadly in the coming months.

The enhanced analytics, Twitter said, will help brands improve their paid and organic strategies on Twitter. It should be especially useful for advertisers, as Twitter product manager Andrew Bragdon explained in a blog post:

For example, if you’re running a campaign to increase awareness about a new cosmetics line, you can use this tool to learn about your potential customers on Twitter — the beauty products they’ve recently purchased, what fashion trends they’re interested in and even TV viewing behavior. Based on this information, you can identify the best segments to target within Twitter Ads, along with which creative — such as a Vine or video clip — your audience will find most compelling.

Among the categories tracked in the insights dashboard: gender, occupation, household income and net worth, home type, home value, marital status, education, consumer buying styles (premium brand vs. natural living vs. weight conscious), favored television genre (drama vs. sports vs. comedy), type of credit card, consumer good preferences (bottled water? coffee? Ice cream and novelties?).

The dashboard, which also enables comparisons of a marketer’s followers or organic audience to the full Twitter audience, is available to all Twitter advertisers and users of Twitter analytics. It’s accessible for signed in users from ads.twitter.com (click on the “Analytics” menu item and select “Audience insights”) or analytics.twitter.com (click on the “Followers” tab).

Here’s a screen shot of each Audience insights category from the @Marketingland account: