I was recently on Twibes and saw they were using an ad network called FeaturedUsers (featuredusers.com) to monetize their Twitter app. I was curious about whether it presented a good value for promoting my Twitter feed, and through that, my blog and my online novels.

FeaturedUsers is a fairly simple concept. It publishes your Twitter profile information with a link over to your Twitter page. They say it helps you get new followers, promote your business, and support apps/sites you enjoy. They make the purchase process fairly simple, allowing you to buy 1,000 impressions for just $10. That means that your profile info will be displayed 1,000 times for $10.

Sounds pretty simple and pretty cool until you start doing the math. Looking at their users page, you can see their top 10 advertisers by CTR (clickthrough rate - the percentage of times a view of an ad resulted in someone clicking on it). Their 10th most popular user, at the time of this writing, had a CTR of 1.081%, which isn't bad for a banner ad in this day and age. But when you do the math...

Let's say that the user with the 1.081% CTR bought the $100 package that throws in a bonus 500 impressions, giving you 10,500 impressions, which is likely because her public dashboard shows she's had 443 clicks. At a 1.081% CTR, that's 113.5 clicks from 10,500 impressions. We'll round up to 114 clicks. So, because she paid $100 for those 10,500 impressions, her net cost was $0.88 per click. Now this wasn't $0.88 per new follower, per new user of her site, or per new purchase at her e-business. This was $0.88 per person curious enough to click on an ad over to her Twitter page.

But that's for one of their top performers. They state their network average CTR (shown on her dashboard) was 0.913% at the time of this writing. If you buy the $10 package and have average performance, you can expect... 9 clicks. That's not 9 new followers on Twitter. That's 9 people curious enough to look at your Twitter page at a cost of $1.11 each.

So, their top performer is paying $0.47 a click, their 10th best performer is paying $0.88 per click, and a user whose ad has average performance is paying $1.11 per click.

So, is FeaturedUsers worth it? Even if you're converting clickers to followers at an amazing 50% rate (and Twitter doesn't offer you tools to gauge such conversions, so you'll have to guess), if you have an average-performing ad, you're paying $2.22 per new follower, and possibly significantly more depending on the conversion rate. I haven't looked into the economic value of Twitter followers, but I'm pretty doubtful they're worth an acquisition cost of $2.22 or more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 4:14 am and is filed under Online Marketing And SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.