Last night, Twitter announced their much-anticipated advertising model: Promoted Tweets.

Twitter: The Start-up Darling

Most of our readers are already familiar with Twitter, the social networking and microblogging service that people and businesses use to broadcast updates (“tweets”) in 140 characters or less. Twitter launched in 2006, hit its stride in 2007, and became the darling of the start-up world in 2009 when Oprah featured the site on her show, which some analysts suggest resulted in over a million new account sign ups.

Along the way, experts have been speculating about whether Twitter can translate its massive user-base to profit. Up until now, Twitter’s revenue has come primarily from search deals with Google and Microsoft, to allow real-time search integration with their own search engines.

Twitter’s own real-time search engine is a huge part of its draw. Millions of people around the world, including journalists themselves, searched Twitter for live updates about top news events like the Iran Election Protests and Haiti earthquake. Trendwatchers follow Twitter’s “trending topics” closely to determine the “next big thing” (and even try to use it to make NCAA Final Four predictions). The Twitter trend feature, topic feeds, and more are all built on top of its search engine.

Promoted Tweets: A Familiar Song

Now, with Promoted Tweets, they’re leveraging that search function even more and adding a new revenue model to the mix. This service will allow businesses to pay for their tweets to be promoted to the top of the Twitter searches they choose. Sound familiar?

The model is remarkably similar to the paid-search advertising model used by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many other engines. Advertisers choose the keywords they’re interested in, and bid for placement at the top of the results.

Also similar to traditional paid search, a top bid does not necessarily guarantee top placement (not forever anyway). Like Google’s “Quality Score” factor, which rewards ads that seem to resonate with users, Twitter will only promote those Tweets that meet a threshold “Resonance Score,” based on users interactions with the Tweets. Users can interact with Promoted Tweets just like regular Tweets – by retweeting, favoriting, and replying to the tweet.

Twitter says that for now, advertisers will pay-per-thousand-views (a.k.a. pay-per-impression) of the promoted Tweet, but they’ll introduce other bidding options in the future. A Resonance Score based on user interactions almost certainly spells out a new pay model for the industry- pay-per-interaction. Tweets don’t have to link to anything, so the model can’t exclusively be pay-per-click. Pay-per-impression is not particularly innovative, and would leave room for gaming the Resonance Score model (what’s to stop big companies from getting all their employees to favorite their Promoted Tweet to maintain a high resonance score?). I expect (hope!) it will be some sort of hybrid between pay-per-click and pay-per-interaction.

What’s Next

Right now Promoted Tweets are only being shown on Twitter search itself, but there are plans to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners soon. On their blog, Twitter indicates this would include displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in a user’s account timeline, which suggests they will show promoted Tweets in the user’s own feed even if they are not following the advertiser directly.

So long as Twitter exercises restraint, and I imagine they will, I don’t think there will be a huge backlash by users seeing these Promoted Tweets in their own feed. That said, I am curious to see how partners like Google and Microsoft will react to promoted Tweets in the API. Will they accept showing Twitter promoted Tweets in their real-time search results for a cut of the revenue? Or will they block these promoted Tweets altogether? Will Twitter provide a revenue share akin to AdSense with those users who embed a Twitter feed on their own site? (I doubt it.) Will they allow sites with embedded Twitter feeds to block Promoted Tweets? (I think site owners will demand the ability to block specific advertisers at least, particularly if Twitter allows political advertising.)

For the time being, the program is only open to specific partners “that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come” and there will only be one promoted Tweet per search results page. As Twitter begins to scale its program, I imagine they’ll run into no small number of challenges. Among the things they’ll have to build for a full launch to the public (in no particular order):

• Advertiser interface for creating and managing an account
• Reporting interface and conversion tracking system
• Broad matching algorithm to ensure that their revenue is not severely limited by the specificity of advertiser keyword lists
• Billing & payments system (not to mention fraud protection system)
• Advertiser customer support team, help centers, etc.
• Impression, click, and (now) interaction spam filters and protections

All that work plus scaling what is no doubt an incredibly complex real-time bidding process (especially considering their resonance score calculation), and it looks like there is a long road ahead. Advertisers spending big bucks will not be as patient with the famous Fail Whale as your typical Twitter user.

Now that Google incorporates video into their universal search results pages, and YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, high-quality video is an essential component to any strategy for increasing online visibility. How can you make sure you get the most out of your YouTube uploads?

Create Content That Gets Results:

1. Create compelling content

You don’t have to be quirky and viral to create successful, high-ROI video for your business to promote on YouTube. Successful examples of video content that work for most businesses and brands include:

• Product demonstration: to show your wares in action
• Introduction to your team: to build a more personal connection
• “How to”: to highlight a product or service in action, to decrease customer support burden
• Office/factory tour: to highlight your capabilities, to bring your business to life
• “Hot topic” discussion: to show your expertise on cutting edge and controversial topics

At the moment, YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes in length for most users (some partners may get special privileges). Make sure to keep your video to this length. If you want to create longer content, make sure to divide it into coherent sections of less than 10 minutes each.

2. Record high-quality video

Use H.264 or MPEG-2 encoding. Record at an “HD” level resolution – this is 1920×1080 (1080p). Record in 16:9 aspect ratio if possible. Thumbnails are now set to show in 16×9 (prior wisdom used to be to upload in 4×3 because thumbnails showed at this ratio, this is no longer the case).

3. Highlight your brand

Don’t forget to include your company name in the video, both verbally and in writing. You can include your logo and company name as a title card at both the beginning and end of the video, or you can overlay it at the bottom or top of the video throughout. If you do not have video editing software, you can include these additions after you upload the video via YouTube’s Annotations feature.

4. Include a call-to-action

Your customer watched your video, now what? Let them know how they can contact you by highlighting your website and phone number in the video. Once again, this can be shown at the beginning and end or it can be displayed as an overlay throughout the video. Using YouTube’s Annotations feature, you can create fields in your video that display your phone number or URLs for relevant areas of your website.

Rank High:

1. Research keywords.

First, you must know which keywords you want to target. You want phrases that are relevant, descriptive, and are searched on. You can determine search traffic on keywords using Google’s Keyword Tool.

For example, more people search on “how to use chopsticks” than “using chopsticks” even though it is a longer query. Also, more people use the compound “chopsticks” than “chop sticks” with a space between the words. This knowledge helps determine which words are best used in title, description, and tags.

2. Use keywords in title, description and tags.

Make sure to keep themes tight and relevant. For instance, you would not want to target “how to use chopsticks” and “Chinese restaurants” at the same time. Instead, you might target “how to use chopsticks,” “chopsticks demonstration,” and “learn to use chopsticks.”

3. Choose the right category.

Make sure to review all the categories before choosing where your video fits. Once you have looked at all the categories, choose the most relevant one.

4. Share your video!

Don’t be shy about promoting your new video. If you use twitter, tweet about it. If you blog, blog about it. Embed the video into your site. Link to it from your email newsletter.

5. Don’t stop at YouTube

Gain incremental traffic by uploading your videos to Metacafe and Vimeo as well. Vimeo allows for significant customization of their channel pages as well as longer-format video uploads than YouTube. Videojug.com and 5min.com are also great sites for uploading instructional and how-to content.

Look Your Best:

1. Be aware of character limits on YouTube.

• Title: Keep your title to 45 characters or less to make sure it is not cut off (…) when displayed in search results.
• Description: Optimize the first 140 characters of your description to include keywords and encourage clicks. This is likely all that will be displayed within YouTube search. Include a functioning link to your website within the first 200 characters of the description. To ensure that it functions, do not remove the http:// from the URL. If the URL is longer than 27 characters, it will be truncated, so it is probably best to link to your home page. You may need to remove the “www” to save characters.

2. Make sure to select the best thumbnail possible.

The thumbnail is the image preview of your video, and the right thumbnail can make a big difference in views. In YouTube, you will be able to choose from three thumbnails, which are taken from the frames at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 into your video. In most cases, at least one of these thumbnails will represent your video well. However, if you find yourself having to choose between three bad choices (frames that are unclear, unrepresentative, etc.), then you can slightly modify the length of your video and re-upload. You will have new thumbnails to choose from.

Pure Visibility was recently selected to join the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network. As part of the thorough application process we had to demonstrate our expertise in applying analytics data to online marketing campaigns.   Andy Chapelle of Crain’s Detroit Business interviewed Linda Girard in Crain’s Detroit Business to find out what this means for Pure Visibility and why this endorsement is so important.

Pure Visibility Inc. joins exclusive group of Web analytic service providers

Google announced yesterday that it is acquiring AdMob, the current leader in the US mobile display advertising space.

Google’s no stranger to the mobile space themselves. They have been offering advertising on their mobile search platform since fall of 2005; and the Android operating system (launched in 2008) is a clear play to stay relevant as more and more people use the internet from a handheld device. This year, they’ve doubled down on their mobile strategy, working hard to expand Android to new devices and networks, strengthening their mobile analytics offerings, and now acquiring AdMob.

In North America, mobile advertising is still in its very nascent stages. Traffic is still a small fraction of what you see with traditional search and display advertising, and there is plenty of debate about whether mobile advertising can match the value of traditional online advertising. On the one hand, there is less space on the screen and therefore fewer things competing for the browser’s attention. On the other hand, the small screen can make it difficult to create compelling and effective landing pages.

Whatever your thoughts on the value of mobile advertising, there is no doubt that mobile internet browsing is poised to grow tremendously over the next few years – and there are a lot of reasons to get excited about that.

Most notably, mobile browsing offers the opportunity to geo-target hyper-specific local areas. When users are browsing the internet on a laptop or desktop device, advertisements are geo-targeted based on IP address. IP address targeting is inherently flawed – for instance, anyone using AOL has an IP address located in Reston, Virginia, regardless of where they are physically located. Mobile devices offer the opportunity to target by GPS tracking – which allow you to accurately target not only the user’s city location, but even the specific neighborhood, or street where they’re located at the moment they load the ad. This obviously opens up tremendous opportunities for local businesses. Imagine if you could target ads to users who were literally standing right around the corner.

Also, many people make the mistake of assuming that mobile advertising means cell phone advertising, which isn’t necessarily the case. New non-phone internet-capable mobile devices are popping up all over the place, from the iPod Touch to the Amazon Kindle and Android-driven Nook.

Few question that the mobile internet is one of the “next big things” in the online world. Many businesses are putting off advertising in the space because they believe there just isn’t a mobile audience for their products or services – and they may be right, for now. But the space is growing at break-neck speed, and competition for ad real estate will only get tighter with time. Why not get in now?

On Wednesday, Google announced the launch of a new reporting feature in AdWords: view-through conversion reporting for display ads on the Google content network.

AdWords display ads show on Google’s partner websites (websites that participate in the Google AdSense program), alongside relevant content. Display ads can have more subtle effects on user behavior than traditional search ads, not just encouraging clicks but also impacting future branded searches and brand recognition.

Google’s new metric sets out to answer the question, “What effect do online branding efforts have on sales and leads?” Now, when a display campaign runs, we can measure not just conversions (sales and leads) coming from clicks directly on the ads, but also conversions that came from people who saw the ad within the last 30 days but did not click.

This may be just the thing that helps sales-focused businesses get into the branding game. If Google can prove that display ads can drive a demonstrable lift in sales, marketing teams will finally have the data to justify branding budget. I, for one, can’t wait to experiment.

Search results on Google often come with a handy “Cached” page link next to the green website address. This cached page link will take you to the version of the page that Google saw when it last visited the site and indexed its content. Some websites change frequently, so these cached versions can be very different from the current page you’ll see if you click on the search result.

There are two ways this can be useful: 1. if the site is no longer available, you can still access the cached page that Google has stored in its archives, and 2. if the site has changed dramatically and is no longer related to your search, the cached page will likely include the content that is relevant.

Sometimes, however, you may not want people to be able to access your cached content. In one case, we had a client whose site had been hacked and stuffed with spammy content about prescription drugs. They had updated their site, but Google still showed the spammy text in the cached page link.

Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to take embarrassing cached pages like this out of circulation. You can follow the steps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35306.

A few good things to note:

• Removing the cached page will not affect search rank in any way.
• However, removing the cached page will mean that you search result no longer includes a short description snippet.
• The cached page link and snippet will return the next time Google visits the page.
• If you do not want the page to ever be cached, you can place the following tag in the <Head> portion of your page’s code: <meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

The Google help page reference above indicates (as of the writing of this blog post) that the cached page will be removed for a minimum of 6 months. According to a Google employee, this is a typo and should indicate that it takes a maximum of 6 months for the cached page to be replaced by an updated page. In our experience, it is usually much shorter than that.

If you haven’t already checked out Google Insights For Search, you really should. Like Google Trends, this awesome tool allows you to figure out how a search query’s popularity has trended over time and compare the trends between these search queries.

But Insights For Search takes this functionality a step further, allowing you to find top searches by location, time range, or any combination thereof.   You can also see the top search terms that include a keyword of your choice. Insights will also make projections of future trends.

While it’s kind of fun to know that “Michigan” is the most popular search term in Michigan (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#geo=US-MI&cmpt=geo), it isn’t immediately apparent how you would use this kind of information to improve your AdWords account.

Here’s an example we ran into recently when we were able to use Insights For Search to inform the way we built out an AdWords account for a client:

The Detroit metro area is home to a large and vibrant Arab community. According to the 2000 census, Arab-Americans comprised 30% of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. Our client, naturally, wondered if we should be targeting the Arabic language and creating Arabic keyword lists since they wanted to target this region. Google Insights for Search to the rescue!

We ran keyword searches within Google Insights and compared the several common terms based on the top searches in Iraq and Lebanon (since Dearborn’s Arab population is primarily composed of Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants or their descendants). In this Insights For Search chart, you’ll find the terms “photos” (blue), “games” (red), and “ramadan” (orange) in Arabic graphed to show their relative popularity in the US. We also tested some terms like “soccer” and “flights” that we thought might be popular, but they were not popular enough to register results.
The states that seem to have a lot of people doing Arabic language searches are Virginia, California, North Carolina, and Florida. According to the last US census, the only state in that group with a larger Arab community than Michigan is California.

It’s possible there aren’t a significant amount of Arabic language searches in Michigan because the Arab population here is longer-standing, much of which immigrated during the first half of the twentieth century. It’s also possible that many of the Lebanese Arabs might prefer to search in French over Arabic, since Lebanon uses both languages, and American keyboards are better-suited to French than Arabic.

Whatever the reason members of the Arab community in Michigan do not search in Arabic, the important question has already been answered – it seems that it is not worth the rather significant investment of time and money to translate keyword lists to Arabic when targeting the Dearborn area.