Dive Brief:

• Seeking ways to expand its revenue options, Twitter is testing displaying Promoted Tweets to users who aren't signed-in or even registered at all.
• Tapping into non-registered users for revenue has been something Twitter investors have asked for from the company. It’s estimated that 500 million people scan Twitter without signing in or registering.
• Twitter is also expanding three test areas that should appeal to direct response marketers: direct response objectives, dynamic ads retargeting, and a partnership with DoubleClick for attribution data on tweet engagement, according to a Marketing Land report.

Dive Insight:

Twitter’s investors have been patiently waiting over a year for the social media platform to announce it’s going to begin making money from the millions of potential users who already skim Twitter without signing in or even bothering to register at all. The first step is to test displaying Promoted Tweets to those people using the parameters available to campaigns directed toward active users.

Twitter's Revenue Chief and COO Adam Bain told investors in an earnings call in October that he foresees these ads monetizing at half the rate of normal Twitter ads, and that the difference lies in how they will be targeted. For those logged out users, Re/code explains Twitter might monetize based on context. So if, for example, you click on a tweet about the Cleveland Cavaliers after searching LeBron James on Google, the company knows you came to the site via Google and that you are interested in "basketball."

“I’m not suggesting that logged out will be as high signal as search results in Twitter, but we do have a lot of great signal that we’ll use about the context that user is in to bring relevant ads to the table,” Bain told Re/code.

Deepak Rao, a revenue product manager at Twitter, said, “By letting marketers scale their campaigns and tap into the total Twitter audience, they will be able to speak to more people in new places using the same targeting, ad creative, and measurement tools. Marketers can now maximize the opportunities they have to connect with that audience.”

The beta test will begin in the U.S., UK, Japan and Australia and will appear in the desktop version of the platform.