Twitter is to offer its advertisers a retargeting option, using cookies to enable brands to target Twitter users who have previously visited their own websites. The move was revealed yesterday in a blog post by Kevin Weil Twitter’s senior director of product revenue.

In the post, Weil writes: “Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones.” Twitter will also enable advertisers to share anonymised versions of customers email addresses (known as hashes, not to be confused with hashtags), in order to target users individually.

No doubt conscious of privacy concerns, Weil makes the point that: “This is how most other companies handle this practice, and we don’t give advertisers any additional user information”.

Twitter users can opt out of the cookie-based ads by unchecking the ‘Promoted Content’ box in their account settings. Users can also activate the ‘Do’ Not Track’ feature in their browser to opt out of the ads. 

Dominic Trigg, managing director Europe at programmatic media-buying platform, Rocket Fuel, believes the launch of retargeting on Twitter is welcome news for advertisers and consumers alike. But he cautions: “The real winners in the advertising industry will be those who can combine the intelligent use of prospecting and retargeting to identify which types of audiences are the most likely to respond. There are 504 septillion different combinations of data points available on which advertisers can base their media buying decisions, from ages and geographical locations to lifestyles and interests.

“Advertisers need to understand which of these are driving conversions on Twitter, and then use this intelligence to identify other key prospects. By far the most effective way of achieving this, at scale, is programmatic buying and this news from Twitter is only going to further increase ad spend in this area.”