Optimizing: website traffic campaigns
Optimizing your website traffic campaign will maximize users visiting and taking an action on your website — like reading an article, downloading a whitepaper, or making a purchase.
This campaign objective was previously known as the website clicks campaign objective.
Top tips
- Use our Website Buttons feature
- Place website tags on your website to track conversions
- Target website visitors and lookalikes of website converters
Gear your Posts towards conversions
When setting up your website traffic campaign, you’ll notice that we offer two options for your ad creatives. One option we call image + link. Catch the user’s eye with an in-post image, and prompt them to click a URL in the post copy.
The other option is our Website Button, which is set up through the use of Website Cards. Use our purpose-built layout to show a compact image with a call-to-action button.
- Test both image + link and Website Button creatives. Among the thousands of advertisers we’ve worked with, some find the eye-catching imagery of image + link performs best for them, while others find that the Website Button's clear call-to-action is most effective. Discover which camp you fall in by testing both types. If you're testing out different image sizes, make sure to refer to our specs page.
- Include a link and explain. Send people to a destination where they can take action. Avoid mis-clicks by managing expectations: will the link lead to where they can browse products? Read an article? Shop your sale?
- Convey a sense of urgency. Why do people need to visit your site right now? Is your offer available for a limited time? Is the supply limited? Consider the real-time nature of the X platform and give people a reason to take immediate action.
- Test different calls-to-action (CTAs). Test more aggressive calls to action (i.e. ‘Get a Quote,’ ‘Book Tickets,’ or ‘Shop our Sale’) against softer CTAs (i.e. ‘Learn More’)
- Keep your Promoted Ads current. Develop a cadence of refreshing with new posts to keep users interests. For your always-on campaigns, consider using a calendar with regular reminders to introduce fresh post copy.
Set up conversion tracking pixels on your website
Conversion tracking lets you measure the number of people who convert on your website after viewing or engaging with your Promoted Ads within a specified time window. To enable conversion tracking, generate one or more website tags in your X Ads account, then place the tags on the respective landing pages. You can set custom attribution windows, view the revenue your campaigns are driving, and see which posts or targeting parameters are driving the most conversions.
Without implementing conversion tracking to provide you a clear picture of your campaign performance, you’re optimizing in the dark. When you choose “website traffic” as the optimization preference for a campaign, you must specify one of your website tags as a key conversion. This represents the tag or site action that is most important to you for that campaign. Learn how to set up conversion tracking for websites.
If you have any issues with your website tag, please download our troubleshooting guide.
Re-market to past website visitors
Create audiences of people who have already visited and converted on your website within your X Ads account via the Tools > Audiences tab. After you've placed website tags on your website, allow a few days for custom audiences of website visitors and converters to generate. As you’re building a new campaign and selecting your targeting, you can choose to target and expand your reach to target similar people. For your audience of website converters, you can choose to exclude that same custom audience, after having expanded it. That way, you’ll target only people similar to your website converters, without re-messaging your website converters.
How can I drive more people to my website?
Our website traffic campaign objective is specially designed to promote your website and get more traffic. These campaigns allow you to feature your website content with Website Buttons — a powerful ad feature that allows users to preview an image, related context, and a clear call-to-action in their timeline.
Follow our above tips to ensure your campaign is fully optimized to deliver the best results.
Learn more about how to set up your website traffic campaign.
Why don't my link click metrics match that of a third-party platform?
In the X Ads Manager, we are reporting on the number of times someone clicks on a link or Website Button. This is logged as soon as the click action happens.
In third-party analytics platforms, you'll receive reporting on the number of times that unique users landed on your webpage and stayed long enough for the page to load completely (triggering their analytics tracking code).
This is what drives the difference between the two numbers you are seeing. This can vary based on:
- Load time - for example, on slow cell networks, it may take longer for the link to request and page to load, so users may exit out before loading the website.
- Intent - users may click on an image but exit out when they realize a website is loading.
To improve these numbers, we recommend testing different creative formats, including:
- Picture + link in post copy - try adding an image + a link in your post copy, instead of using Website Buttons. This has increased link click intent in certain cases.
- Only a link in post copy - try using just a link in your post copy. This too has resulted in more intentional link clicking behavior from users.
Also when using Website Buttons, we suggest using the “Optimize for website traffic campaign" in optimization preference. This will ensure your campaign drives more link clicks by users with high likelihood to convert on their website.
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