Tim Soulo πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ Profile picture
Oct 28, 2020 β€’ 10 tweets β€’ 5 min read β€’ Read on X
How we used Twitter to help launch Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (our new freemium product)..

..and generate ~15,000 registrations in the first 48 hours!

A thread πŸ™‚ Image
Step 1 - The countdown.

This product launch was a pretty big deal for us, so we decided it would be cool to "tease" the upcoming release with a "countdown" on Twitter.

We designed 5 pictures with numbers from 5 to 1 and shared them one by one at @ahrefs Twitter account. ImageImageImageImage
Each of these tweets got around 30-40k Impressions and 1.5-2.5k Engagements.

Both ourselves and our community had quite a bit of fun guessing what we were about to launch. πŸ˜†

Looking back, I wish we'd run ads on this countdown to reach even more people and generate more buzz. Image
Step 2 - The landing page CTA.

AWT is a freemium product. And while it did have quite a few perks for our paying customers, there was no "action" for them to take on the AWT landing page.

So we decided to ask them to help us spread the news by retweeting our announcement tweet: Image
Step 3 - The friends.

We knew we needed to generate as much momentum as we can on the launch day..

So a week prior to launch we emailed a few dozen of our industry friends who have a decent following on Twitter and notified them of the upcoming launch, hoping for their support.
According to @ahrefs Content Explorer, the AWT landing page ended up being tweeted by 700+ people. Many of which have quite a large and active following.

We believe that we wouldn't get this kind of result without the help of our friends and our community!

Thank you, folks! β™₯️ Image
Step 4 - The ads.

We wanted to generate as much exposure as we can with our "launch tweet:"



So naturally, we invested in Twitter ads to expand our reach.

We started from an "Engagement" campaign of $400/day for a total budget of $2,000.
When we saw that it was going well (compared to the performance of our average promoted tweet), we decided to try switching to a "Clicks" campaign for $500/day with the same $2k budget.

This resulted in substantially cheaper clicks:

Engagement - $2.16 CPC
Clicks - $1.60 CPC
In total, our "launch tweet" has generated 564k Impressions and 6k link clicks.

Looking back at it, I think we should have invested more aggressively in Twitter ads (and experimented more).

But in the tumult of other launch activities we forgot to keep an eye on Tw ads πŸ˜– Image
That's it! πŸ™‚

As you can tell, Twitter was quite an important channel for us in terms of generating attention to AWT launch.

I think Twitter is a much better platform for generating buzz compared to Facebook, LinkedIn or TikTok (just kidding).

Looking forward to your comments!

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More from @timsoulo

Apr 21, 2023
How do you create "OG images" for your blog?

- Grab a random image from an article?
- Find a relevant stock photo & slap some text on it?
- Use Canva?
- Order a custom illustration for each article?

Here at @ahrefs we just switched from custom design to auto-generating them.πŸ™‚ Image
There's actually an entire story behind our blog's "featured images," which I shared a few years ago.

Check it out here:
That story ends with us developing a recognisable style and hiring an in-house illustrator to draw a custom image for every single article we publish.

And we were quite happy with this setup for a while...

..up until we started scaling our content output. πŸ˜…
Read 10 tweets
Nov 23, 2022
Since the topic of traffic estimations is top of mind again, let me throw my 2 cents in.

"How accurate are the traffic estimates in @ahrefs ?"

It depends πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

Does the website get lots of traffic from:
- long tails?
- branded searches?
- seasonal queries?
- news/trends?
^ each of these types of search queries have their own caveats.

@ahrefs might not have enough long tails, or underreport the branded searches or lag behind some seasonal trends...

Those things might seem straightforward, but in reality they're super challenging to get right.
That is why the accuracy of organic search traffic estimations in Ahrefs can differ quite substantially for different kinds of websites.

[see the attached graph]

For some websites, we are off by less than 5%. For others, we can be off by more than 500%.
Read 8 tweets
Aug 3, 2022
Zero-Volume Keywords

^ they seem like one of the latest hot trends in SEO.

But I honestly don't get what all the hype is about. πŸ™‚
So an SEO tool like @ahrefs shows that there's little to no searches for a given keyword.

Then you rank for it and look it up in GSC..

And there's actually a bunch more clicks than Ahrefs has promised.

So..? :)
I imagine it is rather well known that Search volumes in Ahrefs won't perfectly match your impressions in GSC.

There are many reasons for it, but here's a super simple one:

- Ahrefs gives you annual average (past 12 months).
- GSC shows you last 3 months data by default.

πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈπŸ™‚
Read 9 tweets
Aug 2, 2022
5 useful things you can do with @ahrefs SEO toolbar.

( 4 of them are FREE )
I'm sure most of you folks are aware of the "original" functionality of Ahrefs' SEO toolbar:

β€’ Show Ahrefs' metrics of a visited URL
β€’ Show Ahrefs' metrics of every page in a SERP
But in the past few years we've expanded the functionality of our toolbar quite a bit & added many useful features to it.

(we've also re-designed it from scratch and made it a lot prettier)

So here are 5 useful features of @ahrefs SEO Toolbar which you likely didn't know about:
Read 9 tweets
May 12, 2022
Keyword Difficulty...

- How much can you trust this 2-digit number?
- How is it even calculated?
- Is KD enough for gauging your chances to rank?

^ I answred all of these questions (& more) in my latest article on the Ahrefs Blog:

ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-d…

TL;DR thread below πŸ‘‡ Image
Let's start from the last Q:

"Is KD metric enough for gauging your chances to rank?"

NO!

Ask any professional SEO to MANUALLY gauge your chances to rank for a given keyword & I'm sure they will refrain from making any specific promises (if they're a true professional ofc).
Many people erroneously expect the Keyword Difficulty metric to boil down the entire sophisticated Google ranking algorithm to a simple 2-digit number.

Like 42.
(did you catch the reference?)

That is obviously not possible.
Read 12 tweets
Apr 6, 2022
9 "interesting" marketing stunts that we did at @ahrefs
Let's face it, most of digital marketing is rather "unexciting:"

- Create "SEO content" & grow traffic
- Run ads on BOFU keywords
- Retarget visitors with FB ads
- Build an email list & setup automation
- Optimise your landing pages
- Start a community
- etc

πŸ₯±
I'm not the most creative marketer on the planet, but I'm always looking for ways to break this routine and do something outside of that box.

So here's a list of 9 "interesting" marketing stunts that we've carried out at Ahrefs in the past few years:
Read 25 tweets

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