We’ve been playing with Twitter ads for a little while and, because we have a few accounts, I noticed an odd disparity. On the Crunch Twitter account we were able to access the full suite of Twitter ad products (Analytics, cards, website referrals, conversion tracking etc.), but on the Freelance Advisor account we couldn’t get to any of that, and were prompted to enter credit card details before we could access anything.
This is, obviously, very annoying. I shot Twitter support an email and a very nice lady called Marta told me that:
Twitter regularly runs experiments offering different features to certain groups of users. As a result, the user experience and availability of features may differ slightly across individual accounts from time to time.
You must be a Twitter Ads customer to gain access to analytics. Please note that it may take up to 24 hours to see your analytics after you have entered your credit card payment information.
So basically our accounts were A/B tested into different buckets, and there’s no way to get out of them. Some people have full analytics access without entering credit cards details, some don’t. I’m not the only person to be annoyed by this.
If I don’t need to spend money to access a feature, @twitter, don’t force me to enter credit card details to do so!
— Gary Robinson (@garyr0binson) July 15, 2014
“You dont need to advertise or spend any money to access the dashboard.Just open a Twitter Ads account,enter your credit card information..”
— Roger Planes (@wodlander) July 15, 2014
However, you actually don’t need to enter your credit card details to access the full Twitter analytics suite. The pages aren’t blocked – they’re just hidden from the menu. You can append the correct information to the ads.twitter.com URL and you’ll be straight in.
The URL structure is:
https://ads.twitter.com/accounts/AccountID/page
Your account ID will be a random string of letters and numbers. Add the correct page after the Account ID slug and you can access the hidden pages. The URLs are (you’ll need to edit the bits in italics to match the information in your account) -
- Account Dashboard - https://ads.twitter.com/accounts/AccountID/campaigns_dashboard
- Tweets - https://ads.twitter.com/accounts/AccountID/tweets
- Cards - https://ads.twitter.com/accounts/AccountID/cards
- Followers - https://ads.twitter.com/accounts/AccountID/follower_dashboard
- Websites - https://ads.twitter.com/accounts/AccountID/websites
There are two other analytics dashboards with slightly different URL structures -
- Tweet activity dashboard - https://ads.twitter.com/user/Username/tweets
- Card Analytics - https://ads.twitter.com/user/Username/twitter_cards
Happy tweeting!
The post How to get to Twitter’s ad dashboards without entering your credit card details appeared first on Jon Norris.
