X (Twitter) ads: The practical 2025 guide for social marketers – Hootsuite Blog

New to X (Twitter) ads? This complete guide covers all the specs you need to know for 2025, plus how to start your first campaign.
Twitter ads get you in front of 586 million highly engaged X users who open the app an average 16 times per day. (Most people only check their email three to five times per day!)
In 2025, X ads are easier to use than ever with automated campaigns you can set up in minutes and a better value than ever with AI targeting increasing conversions by 16% on average.
Keep reading to find out the newest Twitter ads updates and learn how to start your first X ads campaign today.
The short answer is, it depends. Ultimately, how much your X (Twitter) ads cost is up to you.
Right now, the price of an X ad could change in the next five minutes based on campaign objective, competition, seasonal trends, and many other factors.
That said, a recent analysis of 7,000 agencies by EnrichLabs found these average X ads cost benchmarks for 2025:
Cost per mille (CPM) is another common ads cost metric and Hootsuite’s own Twitter ads CPM is $2.09, compared to $2.53 on Meta. Additionally, our CPC on X ads in 2025 is $0.74, compared to $1.41 on Meta.
“Not all social platforms are 1:1,” notes Cedric Bruce-Kotey, Senior Manager, Paid Social at Hootsuite. “Each have to be analyzed carefully.”
Twitter ads only cost $0.01 more than the next highest bidder, thanks to X’s “second price auction model.” For example, if I set my max bid at $2.80 but the ad I’m competing with for top spot bids $1.85, I pay $1.86 to win.
X offers two budgeting strategies to control your Twitter ads cost:
First, double-check you’re logged into your business X (Twitter) account, then follow the steps below.
Log in to your account at X.com then go to ads.x.com.
Select from the dropdown menus, then click Create your first ad.
After completing the basic account set up information, you’ll be taken to the campaign section in X Ads Manager where you can create your first campaign (or do this later).
Choose your campaign objective (more on these later).
Some options may change depending on the objective you choose. Name your campaign then click Next.
Optionally, you can click Show advanced settings to have full control over all aspects of bidding, targeting, and more.
For most users, the simplified mode will deliver better performance while the advanced mode is best suited for experienced advertisers.
If you’re sticking with X’s recommended settings, the next step is choosing targeting settings. Once you’re happy with those, click Next.
Set your daily budget first — X will pre-fill a recommended budget — then enter your target CPA. This is how much you want to pay for each action, but not necessarily what you will pay, as costs fluctuate with the auction system.
You can create your actual X ads. Either upload media and write ad captions, or have Grok (X’s AI assistant) autofill this based on your website.
Once you’ve created all the ads for your campaign, you can save it as a draft or launch.
You need to add a credit or debit card to launch a Twitter ads campaign.
Advertisers spending over $5,000 USD monthly can request an insertion order to streamline billing.
Once you’ve added a credit or debit card, you can begin running Twitter ads campaigns.
For teams, it’s convenient to set up access permissions with multi-user login so more than one account can manage your X ads.
Schedule tweets, answer comments, and manage ads from one spot. Then, show off your results in beautiful reports. It’s so easy.
There are currently nine X ads objectives. These aren’t the same as ad formats, such as a video or Promoted post. The campaign objective is the goal of your campaign, including all ads within it.
X (Twitter) ads campaigns are organized into goal groups:
Reach X (Twitter) ads are all about getting eyeballs on your message and attracting new customers and followers, which is how Tequila Don Ramón earned over 32 million impressions.
Source: @casadonramonmx on X
Objective: Maximize impressions.
When to use this campaign: Building brand awareness or promoting a new product, event, content series, etc.
How you’ll be charged: Per every 1,000 impressions.
Tips for success:
Video view campaigns are similar to Reach campaigns but specific to videos, including carousel ads, live video, and GIFs.
🌿✨ Want a quick nature getaway? Discover Queen’s Well — Kraljičin zdenac! 💧👑#VisitZagreb #LoveZagreb #Zagreb pic.twitter.com/r2BY7zihPu
Objective: Get more video views.
When to use this campaign: Promote your top organic videos for expanded results, and build awareness.
How you’ll be charged: Per view. There are four bid types to choose from based on how long you want people to watch your video, ranging from two to 15 seconds.
Tips for success:
Similar to YouTube video ads, pre-roll ads are shown before a user watches an organic video. Your ad is paired with a topically relevant video, increasing the likelihood that the viewer will be interested.
Source: X
Objective: Get more video views from highly engaged viewers.
When to use this campaign: You want high quality video views from people who will likely watch your entire video (a.k.a. 15 seconds).
How you’ll be charged: Per view, with bid types optimizing for views from two to 15 seconds.
Tips for success:
Promote your app to people most likely to download it. X (Twitter) users are 38% more likely to download an app from an ad compared to users on other social platforms.
Source: @OpusClip on X
Objective: Promote your app and boost downloads.
When to use this campaign: Great evergreen campaign option for promoting specific features to targeted audiences.
How you’ll be charged: Per click to the app store, except App Purchase Optimization mode, which charges per impression.
Tips for success:
Website traffic Twitter ads are useful for organizations of all sizes. You can run super-targeted campaigns to optimize for conversions, which can be sales or other actions.
Source: @framer on X
Objective: Get people to visit your website.
When to use this campaign: Promote new content, such as podcast episodes or items in your store, or get people to sign up for your newsletter or event.
How you’ll be charged: Per impression.
Tips for success:
Engagement Twitter ads are all about getting people to take action. You can promote an existing organic post or create standalone engagement ads.
Source: @voiceforenergy on X
Objective: Get people to like, comment, or share your post.
When to use this campaign: Uncover customer preferences, start conversations, and as an overall boost to your engagement metrics.
How you’ll be charged: Bids are for each like, comment, share, or click (to view the full post) charged per 1,000 engagements.
Tips for success:
App install campaigns attempt to target people who don’t already have your app whereas app re-engagement campaigns target people who already have your app, based on phone tracking capabilities.
Source: @canva on X
Objective: Get existing app users to spend more or use the app more.
When to use this campaign: Offer upgrade discounts or promote new content and in-app purchases.
How you’ll be charged: Per click (leading to your app).
Tips for success:
Sales ads on X take the website traffic objective further by focusing on getting interested buyers over to your site and getting them to convert. New Sales ads are easy to set up: enter a daily budget, targeting information, and launch.
Source: @freedommobile on X
Objective: Increase purchase conversions with X’s AI-powered Optimized Targeting.
When to use this campaign: To sell more, either for new launches or automated evergreen campaigns by connecting your ecommerce catalog.
How you’ll be charged: For every 1,000 impressions.
Tips for success:
Find your ideal audience on autopilot by targeting users who searched for your keyword, posted something with that keyword, or recently engaged with posts containing that keyword. Includes hashtags.
You can add keyword targeting to any campaign from the “Audience features” section.
For example, Walmart could show this post to people who recently used the keyword “lizard”… if they wanted to.
lizard lizard lizard pic.twitter.com/Sx09FLXfbP
Objective: Narrowing your ads target audience within a campaign.
When to use this campaign: You want to reach the people most likely to complete your campaign objective.
How you’ll be charged: Depends on the campaign type you’re using keyword targeting within.
Tips for success:
The following settings apply to:
If combining images and videos in the same carousel ad, all assets must use a 1:1 aspect ratio.
Ad specs vary by format. Timeline Takeover ads can be video, image, carousel, X Live, Promoted text posts, Branded Hashtags, or Branded Notifications.
Video streaming specs may vary depending on your equipment and software, but X recommends the following X Live stream settings:
To use Twitter (X) Dynamic Product and Collection ads, you must install X Pixel or Conversion API first. Then, add your product catalog to X Shopping Manager.
Ad specs vary by format (e.g. image, video, carousel, etc).
Advertisers manage the setup of Branded Notification ads in Arrow, a third-party X partner. Ad sizing and other specs depend on the format chosen. You must choose a trigger to opt people in; most brands ask users to like the post or leave a specific word or emoji in a comment.
There’s no one-size-fits-all “great Twitter ad.” How effective X ads are depends on your audience, industry, goals, format, and more.
But, follow these general guidelines to create more effective Twitter ads:
The bright white text on this ad stands out, reinforcing the caption message, and is reinforced with a great photo and use of their logo.
Source: @mackweldon on X
The most important Twitter metrics depend on your campaign objective. For example, tracking clicks for traffic campaigns, or views for reach-focused campaigns.
For all campaigns, these are the basic Twitter ads metrics you should be tracking:
In addition to tracking overall campaign metrics, Cedric Bruce-Kotey, Senior Manager of Paid Social at Hootsuite, adds it’s important to compare the performance of each creative asset too:
“We monitor metrics for a period of time, around 4-6 weeks, to allow sufficient delivery of assets, and to allow us to make data-driven decisions on which assets/audiences to replace/update.”
Want to make creating and measuring Twitter ads easier? Do both with Hootsuite, along with your other 7,823 social media tasks, all in one place.
Create and schedule organic X posts and ads side-by-side, and see detailed performance of your organic and paid campaigns together. Plus with built-in benchmarking, see how recent ads compare with your typical results.
Maximum effect, minimum effort.
See Hootsuite Social Advertising in action:
Ready for some quick wins to uplevel today? Try these X ads tips.
For Reach or awareness campaigns, your bidding strategy has a lot of impact on your ad performance. If you want more unique people to see your ad — as in, the same people don’t see your ad multiple times — try a higher maximum cost-per-ad (CPA) bid.
Unique reach and repeated reach are both useful for brand awareness. Just be sure to align your bidding strategy with the outcome you want.
These video ad optimization tips are good advice for any platform, though X notes video ads with these four features get 33% more engagement.
While your top performing ad format may be different, our team has found early success with video pre-roll X ads:
“Pre-roll videos are performing strongest in terms of video formats. These are similar to bumpers on YouTube that appear before a video starts. We select categories of videos that we want our ad to appear before,” notes George Bradley, Paid Social Strategist at Hootsuite
Bruce-Kotey adds that targeting is key: “[With pre-roll ads] we are targeting audiences that are more likely to view our ads and more likely to be interested in the content that aligns with our brand, product, and messaging.”
“If budget levels are low, it’s best to start off with the more traditional objectives and ad formats,” says Bradley.
“For example, a reach/brand awareness campaign will allow you to reach as many users as possible with your budget. Similarly, the video view objective would maximise the number of users viewing your ad for a certain amount of time.
Using standard ad formats (mainly static image and video) alongside these objectives would keep costs down and maximise efficiency with a smaller budget.”
Bruce-Kotey acknowledges it can be difficult to measure ROI in a top-of-funnel campaign, but adds:
“A way we like to quantify the success of our top-of-funnel initiatives is the impact that new prospects have on our conversion activity, more specifically, our richness in retargeting audiences.
Which is why we typically run full funnel campaigns.”
Manage organic and paid X (Twitter) content, ads, analytics, engagement, and more — plus all your other social media platforms — all in one easy dashboard with Hootsuite. Try it free today.
Easily plan, manage and analyze ads and organic content from one place with Hootsuite Social Advertising. See it in action.
Create. Schedule. Publish. Engage. Measure. Win.
As an ex-agency strategist turned freelance WFH fashion icon, Michelle is passionate about putting the sass in SaaS content. She’s known for quickly understanding and distilling complicated technical topics into conversational copy that gets results. She has written for Fortune 500 companies and startups, and her clients have earned features in Forbes, Strategy Magazine and Entrepreneur.
Create. Schedule. Publish. Engage. Measure. Win.
3,000+ 5-star reviews ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

source