Using X (Twitter) Ads: A Practical Guide for UK Businesses

Twitter ads, now running under the X platform, remain one of the more underused paid social channels for UK SMEs, largely because the rebrand has created genuine confusion about how the advertising system works today. This guide cuts through that confusion with a straightforward walkthrough: what the ad formats actually are, how to set up a campaign in X Ads Manager, what UK businesses need to know about compliance and billing, and how to measure whether the spend is working.

If you’re already investing in social media marketing and want to test a paid channel that still offers relatively low cost-per-click compared to Meta, X advertising is worth a serious look.

What Has Changed Since the Twitter-to-X Rebrand

The platform was rebranded from Twitter to X in 2023, but the underlying advertising infrastructure remained largely intact. Campaigns are still managed through X Ads Manager (formerly Twitter Ads Manager), and the core ad objectives (awareness, engagement, and conversions) have not changed significantly.

What has changed is the verification requirement. Most advertisers now need an X Premium account (or a Verified Organisation account for businesses) to run paid campaigns. This is a paid subscription, billed separately from your ad spend, and it catches many first-time advertisers off guard. Budget for this before your first campaign.

The other material change is brand safety. Under the current ownership, content moderation has been reduced, which means advertisers have less control over what appears near their ads by default. The Adjacency Controls setting (covered below) is no longer optional for brands with any reputational sensitivity.

X (Twitter) Ad Formats: What’s Available

From promoted posts to immersive video campaigns, X (Twitter) offers ad formats designed to boost visibility, engagement, and conversions. Discover which options work best for brand awareness, audience growth, and performance marketing.

Promoted Ads

The most common format. A standard post (image, video, or text) that appears in the feeds of users who do not follow you. You pay only when a user takes the action you’ve targeted: a click, a video view, or a follow. These work well for driving traffic to a landing page or promoting a specific piece of content.

Video Ads

Video consistently outperforms static images on X in terms of engagement. Short-form videos between 15 and 30 seconds perform best. You can run these as standalone promoted posts or as Amplify Pre-roll, where your ad plays before videos from partner publishers. The latter gives you tighter context control, which matters from a brand safety perspective.

Follower Ads

These promote your X account rather than a specific post, appearing in the “Who to Follow” suggestions. Useful if building an active audience on the platform is a genuine business goal, though most SMEs will get more commercial return from traffic-focused campaigns.

Takeover Formats

Timeline Takeover places your ad as the first thing a user sees when they open X. Trend Takeover puts your promoted hashtag at the top of the Explore tab. Both are high-visibility and high-cost, typically priced in the tens of thousands of pounds per day and suited to large-scale brand campaigns rather than SME activity.

How to Set Up an X Ads Campaign

Getting a campaign live on X takes under an hour. The setup decisions you make in those first few steps, objective, audience, and bid strategy, determine whether your budget works or disappears.

Step 1: Choose Your Objective

X Ads Manager groups objectives into three categories:

• Awareness: maximise reach and impressions
• Consideration: drive website visits, video views, app installs, or follower growth
• Conversion: optimise for specific on-site actions via the X Pixel

For most UK businesses starting, a Consideration campaign targeting website clicks is the right entry point. It gives you measurable traffic data without requiring the pixel setup that conversion campaigns need.

Step 2: Define Your Audience

X’s targeting options are split into three main approaches.

Demographic targeting covers age, gender, location, and language. You can target down to the UK city level, which is useful for local service businesses. Location can be set to specific cities or regions rather than country-wide.

Interest and keyword targeting let you reach users based on the topics they engage with and the keywords they search or tweet about. For a B2B campaign, combining industry-relevant keywords with job function interests tends to work better than broad interest categories alone.

Tailored audiences are the most precise option. You can upload a customer email list, target users who have visited your website (via the X Pixel), or build a lookalike audience based on your existing followers. If you have an existing CRM list, this is usually the best starting point for a first campaign.

Step 3: Set Your Budget and Bid

X offers two budget types:

• Daily budget: caps spend per day, letting the campaign run indefinitely until paused
• Total budget: sets a fixed amount for the campaign’s full duration

For initial testing, a daily budget of £20 to £50 gives you enough volume to gather meaningful data within a week. Anything under £10 per day will produce too few impressions to draw reliable conclusions.

On bidding, the Autobid option is the sensible default for new campaigns. It adjusts your bid in real time to get the most results at the lowest cost within your budget. Manual bidding gives more control once you have baseline performance data and know what a click or engagement is worth to you.

Step 4: Build Your Creative

Keep X ad copy short. The platform is built for quick consumption, and long copy gets cut off in feeds. For image ads, 1200 x 628px is the standard recommendation. For video, 1:1 (square) or 16:9 works across most placements, with a maximum file size of 1GB.

One practical point: X crawls the landing page linked in your ad. If the page loads slowly or has technical issues, ad delivery can be affected. Before launching, run your target URL through a basic performance check.

For help putting together ad creative that connects with your audience, the digital marketing team at ProfileTree works with businesses across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK.

Brand Safety and Adjacency Controls

This section is now essential reading for any UK business running X ads, and it is where most generic guides fall short.

X’s Adjacency Controls (found under Campaign Settings in Ads Manager) let you restrict where your ads appear relative to certain types of content. The settings include Sensitivity Levels (ranging from Conservative to Expanded) and the option to add a Negative Keyword list.

Recommended steps for any brand campaign:

1. Set Sensitivity Level to “Conservative” as your default.
2. Build a Negative Keyword list covering terms that are incompatible with your brand. Include the obvious (profanity, violence, competitor names) but also think about sector-specific terms that could create awkward adjacency. Legal firms, for instance, would typically exclude keywords related to opposing parties or controversial case types.
3. Review the list monthly. X’s content landscape shifts quickly.

Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree, puts it directly: “Brand safety on X requires active management now in a way it didn’t a few years ago. Businesses that set up the Adjacency Controls properly at the start protect their reputation and get better ad placements: the two go together.”

UK Business Compliance: VAT, ASA, and Verification

Staying on top of your UK business compliance doesn’t have to be a headache, even with shifting regulations. Mastering the core requirements for VAT, ASA advertising standards, and identity verification ensures your operations remain seamless, legally sound, and trusted by your customers.

VAT

X charges UK advertisers with UK VAT applied. Make sure your billing account is set up with your business VAT number to enable VAT recovery. You can manage this in the Payment Methods section of Ads Manager before running your first campaign.

ASA Requirements

The UK Advertising Standards Authority requires that all paid posts are clearly identifiable as advertising. X automatically labels Promoted Ads with a “Promoted” badge, which satisfies this requirement. However, if you are running influencer partnerships or paid editorial alongside your X ad campaigns, those require explicit disclosure under CAP Code rules.

Currency

X defaults to USD for new accounts. Change the billing currency to GBP in the Payment Methods settings before you add a card. Once a campaign has run, the currency cannot be changed, so do this before you spend a penny.

Measuring Performance: What to Track

X Ads Manager provides campaign-level data broken down by objective. The metrics that matter most depend on your campaign goal, but for most UK SME campaigns, these are the core indicators to watch:

These benchmarks are indicative and will vary by sector, audience, and creative quality. Run a campaign for at least two weeks before making optimisation decisions; the first few days typically show inflated CPCs as the algorithm learns.

For a broader picture of how paid and organic social activity can complement each other, free Twitter analytics tools can help you baseline your organic performance before you start spending.

Is X Advertising Worth It for UK SMEs?

The honest answer: it depends on your audience. X skews toward professionals, journalists, and people engaged with real-time news and culture. If your customers are active on the platform, the CPC is often lower than on Meta, particularly for B2B audiences. If your target market is not a regular X user, the budget is better spent elsewhere.

Before committing meaningful spend, run a small test campaign of £50 to £100. Use a single ad format, a tight audience, and a clear landing page with conversion tracking. The data from that test will tell you more than any benchmark guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions that come up most often when businesses start working with X Advertising for the first time.