How to Run X Ads. A complete guide

Ever since Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter to X, the platform has seen significant changes that have affected how several businesses approach advertising.

And with these transformations and changes, X has become a powerful advertising platform for brands that want to engage with young, active audiences.

In this blog, I'll provide you with everything you need to know about X ads in 2025.

What exactly are X ads?

X has provided a form of paid advertising, where brands can promote their services with different sponsored content formats.

These ads have allowed the businesses to reach their target audience more effectively, hence increasing brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.

Another plus point is that advertising on X integrates seamlessly into the user’s feed, making it feel natural for the platform’s audience.

Type of ad formats on X:

1. Promoted Posts (Promoted Tweets)

This is the most common X ad format.

Promoted posts appear in users’ timelines, search results, and              profile pages with a small “promoted” label.

These ads contain text, photos, GIFs, videos, polls, and links, which    make them useful for different marketing objectives.

2. Image Ads:

These are the single-photo advertisements that are made to showcase the services/products visually. These ads are perfect for e-commerce brands that have a strong visual appeal, like the food industry, car industry, etc.

3. Video Ads:

The video content has been increasingly important on X in the past few years, where the daily views have seen a big hike of 29% from 2023 to 2024.

Promoted video ads can be proven to have up to 20% more sales compared to other ad formats, making them a high-performing option for businesses.

4. Vertical Video Ads:

Although many might group it with the previous section, the reason these are different as they can be used as full-screen video advertisements, which can appear in between the regular vertical videos that users swipe through the content.

5. Carousel ads:

You can consider these as image ads.

But on steroids!

As they allow up to six horizontal-swipeable images or videos, which are perfect for showcasing multiple products, features, or promotions in a single advertisement.

6. Text ads:

These are simple, natural advertisements that can blend easily with regular X content.

These ads will help you expand the reach of your posts beyond your followers, more towards your desired target audience.

7. Promoted Trends:

These are the advertising placements that will appear in the trending topics section, and hence giving brands maximum visibility during peak engagement hours.

8. Promoted Accounts:

This ad campaign would suggest your account to the users who might be interested in your content or services.

X Ad campaign objectives:

When you run an ad on X, there are several things that you can aim at as offered by X, and these are;

1. Awareness: This is to increase the brand's visibility and reach.

2. Engagement: To drive likes, retweets, replies, and clicks.

3. Traffic: To direct users to your website or landing page.

4. App installs: Promote your mobile application.

5. Conversions: The aim is to drive specific actions like purchases or sign-ups.

6. Lead generation: This is to collect contact information from potential customers.

Targeting options:

X provides various targeting capabilities that would help you to reach the right audience, and they are as follows;

- Demographics

It filters users based on their Age, gender, location, language, and device type

- Interests and Behaviours:

This is to target users based on their interests, behaviours, and engagement patterns.

- Keyword targeting:

It is designed to reach users who have tweeted or engaged with specific keywords that align with your product or brand.

- Follower targeting:

It targets followers of the competitor's account.

- Tailored audience:

It is for uploading customer lists and using the website visitors for targeting.

- Lookalike audiences:

It is designed to reach your target audience, which is similar to your existing customers.

READ MORE: How To Do SEO In 2025: Strategies That Actually Work Today

Step 3: Technical SEO

1. Natural feeling - content:

Your ads must blend naturally with the organic content that is already available on the platform.

To further ensure the natural feeling, try to avoid the overly promotional language and rather focus on providing value to the users.

2. Leverage trending topics:

Try to stay more in front of people with the trending hashtags and topics that are relevant to your industry to increase visibility and engagement.

3. Use strong visuals:

Use high-quality images and videos, as they would instantly and significantly improve your ad performance.

Also, ensure that they are optimized for mobile viewing, since most of the X users access the platform via mobile devices.

4. Implement a clear CTA

This is to tell the users what they should do after they have considered your advertisement, and having a strong, clear CTA is important; otherwise, the whole campaign goes in vain.

Just ensure that the CTA aligns with your campaign objectives.

5. Test different ad formats:

Try to experiment with different ad formats so as to identify what resonates best with your target audience and, in turn, brings your brand the highest ROI.

6. Monitor and optimize:

Always regularly analyze your campaign performance and make periodic tweaks and adjustments to your ad campaign so as to improve the existing results,

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Current Market Landscape:

Now, after knowing all the procedures and practices you need to follow to succeed on X, there are some things that you need to keep in mind before you are sure you want to invest in X advertising. These are some recent developments made in 2025;

- 26% of marketers plan to spend less on X ads.

- 4% of marketers consider X ads safe for their brand, whereas the number is 39% for Google Ads.

- Less than 25% of experts plan to increase their marketing campaign on X

Despite these challenges, X still remains and is maintaining an active user base to engage with brands, which makes it valuable for businesses to effectively use the platform’s unique user base and features to their advantage.

I hope this helped! 

Until then, Happy Digital Learning 😍