Twitter’s Ads API does not provide the ability to “pause” a Promoted Tweet (their visibility is instead controlled by parent Line Items). We saw this as an opportunity to introduce a valuable feature for users who organize their campaigns by promoting multiple tweets within a single Line Item and wish to manage their visibility.
We discovered that destroying a Promoted Tweet (effectively “unpromoting” the tweet), then creating it again within the same Line Item had the effect of “undeleting” the Promoted Tweet - it retained its original ID. This made it possible for us to synthesize “Running” and “Paused” statuses for Promoted Tweets by using the DELETE (https://dev.twitter.com/ads/reference/delete/accounts/%3Aaccount_id/promoted_tweets/%3Aid) and POST (https://dev.twitter.com/ads/reference/post/accounts/%3Aaccount_id/promoted_tweets) APIs to promote and unpromote a Tweet, while reporting its stats consistently across states.
After deletion, the API indicates that the tweet is no longer promoted, and the Twitter Ads UI’s Edit Campaign view indicates the same, but the UI’s List Campaigns view still shows the tweets. In fact, we’ve found that tweets unpromoted by using the DELETE API always appear in the List view.
We’ve run experimental campaigns to test and can verify that the deleted tweets do not spend, and are effectively unpromoted. It appears to be a bug in Twitter’s Ads UI, but we would appreciate some confirmation and clarity.
