Smaato is a supply-side publisher platform (SSP) from the Verve Group since the 2021 acquisition.
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X Ads
Score 5.7 out of 10
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Formerly Twitter Ads, X Ads is a search engine marketing tool built around features such as objective-based campaigns, promoted trends, and in-depth analytics.
Twitter is well suited for brands seeking to effectively manage and tweak their advertising campaign, while also interacting in real-time with people who stumble on their ads, thus maximizing optimal result. It is also my suggested ad platform for brands who want to target the younger generation, especially millennials and those born in the 1990s.
While the targeting of Twitter is relevant most of the time, it is not always right and there are some ads that are completely unrelated to the search terms entered.
Smaato has a UI where you can control your line items on the traffic you want to receive. That is a key unique selling point that other SSPs don't offer. Most of the items that you will need like reporting can be done on a self serve manner and that is a big plus, specifically for changes that need to happen really fast and you don't need to deal with account managers that may take some time to answer emails.
The tool is ok to use, and ads are becoming more skippable on Twitter, so we are unsure as a company if it's still a good channel for direct response messaging. It does not perform as efficiently as other social platforms for lower funnel marketing. It does well for awareness campaigns that are set and forget, but optimizing for DR is not as efficient when you are trying to manage the ads on the client side.
Smaato's account management team is very professional. They are quite fast in terms of customer support, which is very helpful. One item that stands out is that they are willing to understand what you need for each campaign and what is the best way to move forward. They don't just jump quickly into trying to upsell more of Smaato's products (audiences, data) like other SSPs do.
Smaato has better anti-fraud controls than most exchanges. Even if the inventory ends up being a bit pricey, I am more comfortable running campaigns on Smaato because I know there won't be any issues with the clients claiming refunds for invalid traffic. I believe that as the industry matures, other SSPs will follow suit and prices will increase along with the board.
Compared to Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads was more expensive. However, when we only look at the conversions rate of Twitter Ads, it always had way higher numbers, mainly because it is conversation driven and allows for the customer to speak directly to you as a business owner in a 2 way conversation.
We have seen prices a bit high, thus reducing profitability
However, the vast reach has allowed us to get more budgets and fulfill them so the net effect is positive.
We have been able to run campaigns that targeted the same user on mobile and desktop by running with Smaato and that has allowed us to get more budgets from specific clients.
One Positive Impact has been that having ads running has increased the number of followers we have on Twitter.
Another positive impact is that due to having more followers, we now have more visits to our site.
A mixed impact would be that positively, since we have Adwords implemented as well, we can track back the source of our website traffic to being from a social source like Twitter. The negative of it is that Twitter ads does not have the tracking capability and we still need Google Adwords to do so.
