More and more Twitter Advertising networks are launching. There are long time leaders RevTwt and Magpie, and there are new comers sponsored tweets and ad.ly among many others.

Both sponsored tweets and ad.ly put their bets on celebrity Twitterers and are based on a cost per tweet model. The pay is  quite high, hundreds to tens of thousands per tweet based on the number of followers you have. Since many of these tweets use a bit.ly link so anyone can  track the number of clicks using a link like this: http://bit.ly/info/41vuMB 0 

We tracked 20 such tweets that were posted over the last 4 weeks or so and estimated the average cost per click is $52! That is based on the click counts on bit.ly, but bit.ly counts bot clicks. There are many bots tracking links on Twitter, such as tweetmeme, powertwitter, twitturly, etc., trying to index and rank the links on Twitter. These bot clicks can account for 80 to 95% of clicks on a link in a Tweet. Take this into consideration, the average CPC can be $250 or higher for real human clicks. Now figuring in sponsored tweets or ad.ly’s cut at a conservative 30%, the real cost to advertisers is in the range of $72 if you consider all bit.ly counts are real human clicks, or $357 per click or higher if you discount the bot clicks in the bit.ly counts. 0 

Brand advertisers may be lured by the celebrity Twitterers in the beginning, but at the end, it is the ROI that matters. How many advertisers would keep paying such high prices with a very negative ROI?  Why pay $50, $70,  or $250 per click, when you can get targeted clicks on search engine at a couple dollars or less? Or get Twitter clicks from Revtwt at $0.10 to $0.40 per click? 0 

We are not alone in this assessment. Check this out Sponsored Tweets: a case study in Twitter marketing fail

The Twitter advertising solution offered by Revtwt appears to be the most practical. The key to their solution is a pay for performance CPC platform that is backed up by click filtering to filter out bot clicks and fraudulent clicks.  Advertisers are getting “an impressive ROI”, a review by marketingprofessor.com.