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
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looks promising Twitter is a great tool tool use but like you said their is also a lot of shady bots – people etc… Good thing they have a system in place to prevent that from happening. I might sign up for this nice post!
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Interesting stats but I hope this service will survive after twitter announcement to block third parties that use their API to put ads in stream…. it will be interesting to see how it plays out
It will be interesting to see how they work around it. It will end up becoming more like Izea's Social Spark, where it is a manual and approval process. Much slower than the current automated system.
Thanks a ton for keeping us updated Zac, I read your first post about starting on SponsoredTweets and been waiting anxiously about the results.
It seems a bit hit and miss but we'll have to see how it pans out over time, you still have quite bit to go.
You're giving some very great ideas 🙂
I am wondering how Sponsored Tweets can keep going with these new rules and how the tweets can be monitored now?
I can't imagine it not slowing down business for SponsoredTweets and Ad.ly as it's now a manual process. Twitter simply wiped out the competition against their own ad platform.
60% is definitely way too high, I think they should have started out lower, and then slowly creep that number up with more time on their system. Although I will give high praise for their system catching alot of invalid clicks, its great to know they are on top of things like that, and it would be great if they stressed that their system is good at doing this, as it will mean advertisers are more trusting you know?
Although I will give high praise for their system catching alot of invalid clicks, its great to know they are on top of things like that, and it would be great if they stressed that their system is good at doing this, as it will mean advertisers are more trusting you know?
I will give high praise for their system catching alot of invalid clicks, its great to know they are on top of things like that, and it would be great if they stressed that their system is good at doing this, as it will mean advertisers are more trusting you know?
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