Controversy & Poor Performance – Why We Don’t Recommend Advertising On X
Brand Safety On X
Elon Musk and X (formerly Twitter) are making news again as another wave of advertisers have announced they are ending all campaigns on X in the wake of a report by Media Matters showed ads running alongside openly pro-Nazi content. This report was published less than a week after Musk seemed to publicly endorse an anti-semitic conspiracy theory on his own X account.
As these obvious brand safety issues have come to light, more than a dozen major brands have stopped advertising on the platform, including Fox Sports, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros, Apple & more.
Campaign Performance On X
Elon Musk’s various controversies are extensively covered, and definitely a big piece of why many companies are choosing not to advertise on X any longer. But one thing that has been very overlooked in this ongoing saga between X and its various advertisers (or lack thereof): do X ads work? In our opinion, they do not.
Generally speaking, we are trying to achieve one of two things with a digital media buy. Most often the goal is to drive relevant audiences to a website or app where they complete some action (form submission, purchase, phone call, etc) although in some cases it’s just to grow/maintain brand awareness among those audiences.
The case against using X when trying to drive conversions is pretty open and shut from our experience. We’ve never seen any channel drive a higher rate of traffic that immediately bounces off the site or has such little engagement. It’s unclear if this due to bot accounts clicking through every available link, or just an extremely high rate of accidental clicks on ads driven by the placements on mobile feeds, but true on-site conversions driven directly from twitter are rare at best.
So, what about campaigns that just want to drive awareness among target audiences? Again, X simply doesn’t stack up to the capabilities and efficiencies you can get with other digital platforms. Their average CPM isn’t terrible – somewhere between $5 and $7 depending on which benchmarking resource you use. This is within range of what you might see on Meta or YouTube – maybe even a bit cheaper. But despite launching in 2006, Twitter just doesn’t have the same depth of targeting capabilities as those other platforms. Additionally, the format of the platform itself makes each impression significantly less valuable – swiping past an ad in a split second isn’t the same as being forced to watch even 5 seconds of a YouTube ad.
Even if you ignore the possibility of your ad serving alongside actual neo-Nazi content (you shouldn’t!), X campaigns simply fail to drive the meaningful results you can achieve on other platforms, which is why at Refine we will continue recommending campaigns on Meta, Google, YouTube & Reddit to our clients.