First Results from Sponsored Tweets CPC Ad Campaign

Earlier this month SponsoredTweets announced they are now accepting advertisers for their new CPC model. Their only previous method for advertising, was simply to pay whatever that tweeter was looking to receive. For most advertisers this usually resulted in extremely high click costs, even with ClickWatch in place to prevent high ad costs.

With the new CPC model in place, it opens a whole new world for advertising on Twitter. You no longer have to worry about ending up with high click cost numbers, and this allows more functionality and control over your ad campaigns.

Last week I set up my own ad campaign to promote Six Figure Affiliate Blogging and targeted only “blogging” and “affiliate” related tweeters. The results are below.

So far 128 different users have sent out a tweet, and only 120 legitimate clicks have been sent in. Sponsored Tweets has done a really great job at managing fraud, as they have captured 640 clicks that they describe are from “Clicks that are from bots or were considered fraudulent, duplicates, generated from click farms or otherwise considered invalid.“. If these weren’t weeded out, it would have ended up costing me an extra $64.00.

My settings are to pay out .10 per click to twitter users that send out my message, but SponsoredTweets takes a 60% cut, which brings it down to .04 per click in the marketplace. I think the 60% rate is way too high, and makes most of the advertisers look really cheap, but they are actually willing to pay double what it looks like. You can see the rest of available CPC tweets to send out below.

If the volume was there and ST didn’t take such a big chunk of the deposit, I think there would be a lot more action. This would also make for a great opportunity to push affiliate offers, as you have a set price you are paying per click.

So how is my campaign actually perfoming? So far only $12 of the $300 I deposit was spent. Of the 120 valid clicks that came through, the landing page converted at 13% vs. the 60% average it’s seeing from most others promoting it. Roughly 15 leads for $12… not looking too good, but we are only 5% into the total spending of my ad campaign. I might end up raising the CPC to see if more tweeters decide to pick it up in the marketplace.

UPDATE: Today Twitter came out with news that they will no longer allow third party advertising through the use of their API. This will dramatically affect companies like SponsoredTweets and Ad.ly. Ted Murphy (founder of Izea / SponsoredTweets) had the following to say. The biggest take away is the following quote from Ted;

“We are going to make some changes to the way Sponsored Tweets works. We will no longer be publishing directly to your account through the Twitter API. Instead you will have to write the tweet yourself in whatever Twitter client you see fit.

Yes, it will be a more manual process. Yes, we liked the old way better too. But we want to comply with Twitters guidelines and be a good ecosystem partner. We have always made adjustments to our system to remain in compliance. Twitter has allotted 30 days to make this change, we will try to get it out as soon as we can. Until then it is business as usual.”

– Try SponsoredTweets