Twitter Inc (TWTR) Target Price Raised By Evercore

Updated on

Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) announced the complete rollout of its Tailored Audiences ad targeting feature this week, and Evercore Partners analysts see this as a major positive. As a result, they have reiterated their Overweight rating and raised their price target on Twitter from $43 to $52 per share.

Twitter’s Tailored Audiences

Twitter has been testing its Tailored Audiences feature since July. The product enables advertisers to go beyond targeting Twitter users based on the Twitter platform. In other words, instead of being limited to data about the user’s gender, location or other very basic information, Tailored Audiences allows advertisers to use cookies and hashed email addresses, which will enable them to better target Twitter users.

The similarity of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)’s Tailored Audiences feature to Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s Custom Audiences feature wasn’t lost on Evercore analysts Ken Sena and Andrew McNellis. They see “little difference” when comparing the two products, both of which use email addresses and data from browsers to help advertisers retarget users. Both products also require brand names to work with select providers of data management services to assist with data encryption.

The positives of Twitter’s Tailored Audiences

The analysts expect Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)’s new feature to push greater engagement among users by placing Promoted Tweets which are more relevant in the feeds of users. As a result, they believe advertisers will be willing to pay more engagement.

Because of expectations that Twitter will be able to charge more, the analysts have increased their estimates for the micro-blogging site. They had been largely anticipating this enhancement, so they didn’t change their topline estimates significantly. They did change the cost of deployment, however, because they think it might not be as expensive to deploy as they originally thought. They note that Twitter, like Facebook, is building the tools and data sets, but its marketing partners are taking on much of the optimization expense required to drive performance.

They raised their 2015 EBITDA estimate to $415 million from $345 million.

Leave a Comment