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Now Boarding: The Twitter Ad System Failboat
Posted by Ad Hustler | Posted in Ad Networks, Affiliate Marketing | Posted on 14-04-2010
As usual, there’s plenty of hype surrounding a new ad system that’s being released: The Twitter Ad System. Considering Twitter is such a popular website you would think i’d probably be excited about it. Quite honestly, I’m not. I think it’s going to be a failboat for affiliates and i’m going to tell you why.
My buddy Jonathan Volk just wrote a post about Twitters Ad System so rather then rewording the details of the system i’m going to grab his breakdown and make some comments. Read his post here.
“As we previously described, the new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.”
Fail #1: I’m sure people do use search.twitter.com. I even use it on rare occasion if I want to see what random people are saying about something. The KEY word in the previous sentence is RARE though. 99% of my twitter use is either tweeting or looking at my lists and seeing what my friends are saying. Considering a very large percent of twitter use is mobile as well, what is the percentage of the overall Twitter Population that is going to use Twitter Search? My guess is that it’s low and that’s a straight up fail. If this is the only way the advertising system is going to serve ads it’s actually kind of a joke because companies like Sponsored Tweets & Ad.ly will still thrive and be a MORE effective advertising method then Twitters own system. Why would you let a parasite service take your revenue? Makes no sense.
Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored. The Times piece notes that companies could use this to combat negative tweets (they can place a positive tweet at the top of the page)
OK, I would expect disclosure. If a company thinks that an ad at the top of the search results is going to combat negative tweets, that’s a company that just doesn’t get social media. The only way to combat negativity in social media is to FIX THE PROBLEM. In addition, most people trust their peers so if a peer they are following tweets negatively about a company, they are going to see it in their stream. This ad would never reach their stream because again they aren’t using search.twitter.com.
A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.
Quality Score? Uggghhh. Go ahead and piss off your advertisers before they even start advertising with you.
One ad will be shown at a time
Wowzerz…I’m impressed.
Initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo
This doesn’t surprise me at all. My guess is that they went after these types of advertisers because they don’t really care about ROI. By taking on “branding” (ie: immeasurable) advertisers they could avoid negative reviews like this one for a while.
Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweets
No real comment here but branding campaigns do normally run CPM.
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Facebook Ads were a huge win for affiliates and self serve advertisers. We all know that although their ad approval team is recruited from the monkey cage at the San Diego Zoo, they do have an awesome advertising offering. Let’s give some thought as to what makes it awesome. It’s really a pretty simple answer: insane targeting. You can target demographics, workplace as well as interests. All of this targeting makes figuring out ways to appeal to these users gosh darn easy. Facebook users SELF IDENTIFY themselves and that’s key.
This is the major problem with Twitter Ads. Their is no self identification on Twitter. This is what’s going to make it hard to ever have effective in-stream advertising run by Twitter. You can argue that they will come up with some sophisticated algorithm that can detect themes in a persons overall tweets and serve ads to those themes but I don’t think it will work. Let’s say I tweet 10 times and this is what I say.
1) I just started a new Facebook Campaign and all Ads were denied
2) I just took a massive dump and there was corn in it
3) The trees outside are blooming
4) My car smells like rotten milk
5) Check out this article http://www.link.com
6) Weekend is almost here
7) Jersey Shore was hilarious last night
8 ) Class is not determined by what you spend
9) Just went to Ikea
10) My foot just fell off
It’s going to be very hard to create a theme out of random tweets and plenty of Twitter users tweet randomly.
What are your thoughts? Do you think the Twitter Ad System (as it stands) is going to be effective? Let’s discuss!



