There are a lot of things we are working on that I cant mention at this time with regards to ad performance on Twitter that comes from Twittad. But I will tell you that the #1 problem in our business plan is what everyone is talking about, the issue of not being able to click on a ad and gain the measure for the advertiser.

I will say that the Twitter community is a very intelligent and active audience. If a advertiser buys their profile I would bet many would promote that ad or service through their tweets or on their blog. Providing success for the advertiser not only comes from the views on the ad, but also the attention that comes from the purchase. Twitter users can mention the advertiser through Tweets and blog posts on the Twitter users website. To that degree, I will say we are working on something to solve this.

Again, thanks for the post and stay tuned.

James Eliason
President/CEO
Twittad.com

Although I don’t think you intended to call my an unintelligent Twitter user, let me assure you that I use the service regularly. I totally forgot that you can’t even click on the background of the ads, and in my opinion that’s just another area of conversion that’s going to be added to the sales funnel. Based on the sample ads that I saw via TechCrunch I suppose the idea is to get Twitters to follow a “sponsored” Twitter account, i.e. one that belongs to a corporate blog and so forth. That idea has some merit to it - it uses basic permission marketing to get people to opt-in for updates from a service and I’m all about that.

However, how do you gauge performance for TwittAd then without CTR metrics? If your advertisers use TwittAd as the only method of promotion for a said Twitter account then measuring the total number of subscribers acquired makes sense as a metric, but what if they promote their account through other means, such as on the corporate blog itself per my earlier example?

I still think the idea is poor given the sales funnel - there’s just too much loss at any given step and the reach isn’t broad enough. However, I like your ideas about designing TwittAd to move alongside the evolution of Twitter and given that I left my crystal ball at home this morning I can’t speak to what Twitter may do and how it will be received by its user base.

Even if I don’t think the idea is good I still wish you the best of luck. Go get em!

Thanks for responding to my comment. I totally overlooked the fact that those background ads are not clickable. Rather than provide you a full reply now I’m going to let the article air out for a bit before I get back to you.

You provide a very well thought out advertising scenario. As the CEO of Twittad I would just like to give my take on things if I can.

Twittad knows that the background images on a Twitter users profiles are not clickable. Intelligent Twitter users know the same. Hence why you see the easy entry point prices being posted on Twittad. But I see Twitter evolving. My speculation is that if Twitter wants to gain more than just a simple 140 character business they will begin to develop their users pages more.

Allowing the users to upload applications, provide more than one simple link to a blog, the ability to upload photos, etc. This could be where Twitter is headed. Increasing the time a user spends on Twitter and having users viewing a profile page will increase page views, the time spent on the web version of Twitter, and bring in advertising dollars.

In addition to an Ad being seen on a profile background, when a user clicks on another user to send a Direct Message (DM) that users profile background image (with the Ad) is displayed. So one more spot for advertisers to gain a “eye”. If and advertiser wants to track effectiveness they could do so by displaying coupon codes and a different trackable URL, etc in their Ad.

I think you bring up some very good points, and they are all ones that were in our business model at the very beginning. It is our view that Twitter is in version 1.0. There are going to be many more versions of Twitter, and based on the amount of Twitter users signing up on Twittad..over 430 total as of today (9/3) people are open to this concept.

We are working on a lot of development and in the next few weeks we will roll out the second version of Twittad that will more effectively tie advertisers to Twitter users worldwide.

Regards,
James Eliason
President/CEO Twittad.com