What Is X Ads? Formerly Twitter Ads, Priced by Auction

The short answer: if you can spare a few hundred dollars, X Ads will run on it: there is no minimum spend, the daily budget on an ad group is a cap X commits not to exceed, and on the Website traffic objective you pay per impression or per link click, so $20 a day for 30 days is at most 20 x 30 = $600 (X Ads pricing, campaigns 101, checked on 5 November 2026). X Ads is the self-serve ad platform of X, the network that was Twitter, run from Ads Manager at ads.x.com.

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Before the first campaign:

1. Match what you pay for to what you want. For example, an ad group paid by link clicks at a $1.50 maximum bid and a $30 daily budget buys at most 30 / 1.50 = 20 clicks a day; on Pay by impressions the $30 goes whether anyone clicks or not (campaigns 101).
2. Bring the audience you already have. A customer file matched to @handles, or a website audience from the X Pixel, is usable from 100 matched users (custom audiences).
3. Install the pixel first. Base code before the closing head tag on every page, then a Lead or Purchase event, which is what the results count (conversion tracking).

Objectives, formats and the name

A campaign holds one objective, and the objective sets what you pay for (campaigns 101): Reach per impression; Video views per impression or per view; Pre-roll views per view; App downloads per app click; Website traffic per impression or per link click; Engagement per engagement. Ad groups under it carry the goal, bid, targeting and placements (Ads Manager guide).

The catalogue lists Promoted Ads (image, video, a carousel of up to six cards, text), Vertical Video Ads, X Amplify, X Takeovers, X Live, Dynamic Product Ads and Collection Ads (products page). Vertical Video is 9:16, 15 seconds recommended and up to 2:20 (vertical video page).

X's help pages now say X Ads and Posts (account creation); the Ads API still calls the ad entity a promoted tweet and the default placement ALL_ON_TWITTER (Ads API analytics).

Who it suits, and who it does not

A team whose buyers are known by what they post about. X's targeting pages describe keywords matched against what people post, engage with and search for, follower look-alikes built from around 30 handles, 82 interest categories and custom audiences (keyword targeting, interest and follower targeting); a job title is not among them. A B2B team that buys by seniority and company, or needs a published price list, is on the wrong network.

What it costs

There is no price list. Each ad enters an auction; the bid is the most you will pay for the objective's action, and the price depends on how engaging the ad is, the audience's size, how many advertisers want it and the bid (X Ads pricing, checked on 5 November 2026). Spend accrues against a credit limit, charged at a threshold; ads pause while a balance stays unpaid (credit limits). Billing currency follows the country chosen at account creation and cannot be changed afterwards (currency). For the Dutch searcher typing "twitter adverteren": EUR is in the Ads API's list of supported currencies (Ads API currency), and invoices carry a VAT line set by your location (invoices).

The form's defaults are X's own: on a Website traffic campaign, Pay by impressions is preselected and the pricing page labels the impression option recommended, which bills X when the ad is shown rather than when the link is clicked (website traffic campaign guide).

How it compares

LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn targets by job title, function and industry across more than 20 attribute categories: choose it when the buyer is defined by role, X when the buyer is defined by topic.

TikTok Ads. TikTok Ads Manager recommends a daily ad group budget of $30 in North America and EMEA and targets by demographics, interests and behaviours; short vertical video is the format the two share.

Reddit Ads and Meta Ads. Reddit Ads is the rival when the conversation lives in a forum rather than a feed; Meta Ads is where most budgets already sit.

Reporting exports. Supermetrics exposes 157 metrics and 141 dimensions from the Ads API (Supermetrics docs); Windsor.ai lists PostgreSQL and Amazon Redshift among its destinations (Windsor connector); Dataslayer covers Sheets, Looker Studio, Power BI and the warehouses (Dataslayer connector).

Getting started

Create the ads account from the handle you will promote, install the pixel, and run one Website traffic campaign on a daily budget you can lose. How to use X Ads runs that campaign for a B2B landing page.

FAQ

Is there a minimum spend on X Ads?

No. X's pricing page says there is no minimum spend, and the daily budget set during campaign setup is a cap (X Ads pricing).

Can I be billed in euros?

Yes, if the ads account's country uses the euro; a change of currency means a new account through a support ticket (currency).

What is the X Ads API for?

Campaign management, custom audiences, creatives, lead forms and analytics, through an access form X says takes up to 3 business days to review (Ads API introduction).