SponsoredTweets Release for July 8th

A small release went out yesterday that, amongst other things, should help Advertisers to clarify where funds are for Cost Per Click opportunities. We didn’t make it as easy as we would have liked for Advertisers to find out exactly where their money was at a given moment. Now though, we think this should be a lot more clear. Here’s a sample screenshot of a CPC Opportunity.

Advertiser Opps

So what are we looking at here?

1. Next to your CPC tab, you may see a number in parenthesis. This is the total number of offers waiting for approval for all of your CPC Opportunities. In this case there is only one opportunity, so it matches the number of offers for approval on that opp. If you have selected “Automatically Approve Offers”, then they will be automatically approved and not up for approval. 3 days after the Tweeter submits their Tweet, it’ll be automatically approved — same as if you had approved it yourself.
2. Budget – The budget is set per opp. This is how much we’ll restore to the ‘balance’ of the opportunity whenever you refill this opportunity. You can choose to refill this manually (as is the case in the screenshot), or let us automatically refill to your ‘budget’ amount daily or monthly. In this case the balance is $20, so it would cost $30 to refill it up to the $50 budget.
3. Cost – How much has been spent for valid clicks that have come through. This is fully committed money spent for clicks that were valid according to ClickForensics and our in our methods for detecting what a good click is. This does not include bots and web crawlers, fraudulant clicks or duplicate clicks or otherwise invalid clicks.
4. Balance – This is how much of the ‘budget’ is left to find new Tweeters to take this opportunity. As you approve more Tweets, the ‘balance’ will decline and be moved into (5) ‘hold’ to cover expected clicks on each Tweet. So for this opp, if based on past performance we think the Tweeter will get 10 clicks on an Tweet, we’ll move $1.00 from (4) ‘balance’ to (5) ‘hold’. You can continue to approve Tweets even after you balance gets to 0, and we’ll queue those Tweets up to go out as soon as funds are available. You can withdraw your balance back to your available funds at any time.
5. Hold – This is the total amount on hold to pay Tweeters whose Tweets have gone out or are about to go out. In the case I mentioned above, we put $1.00 on hold for the Tweeter. If after 3 days, the Tweeter hasn’t received 10 clicks on this opp, we’ll refund whatever was left from ‘hold’ to ‘balance’. We’ll immediately try to use this money to pay other Tweeters who received more clicks than we expected, then use everything that’s left to Tweet out more of your already approved Tweets.

There is no major change in how this works in this release, but we wanted to make it more clear what was going on behind the scenes. If you have any questions or concerns about how this works, please let us know!

Other Changes

The vast majority of changes for this release were performance and quality based, but we did fix a few things that needed attention. Advertiser now have 200 characters for their instructions, and those will show up to the Tweeter using the same spacing the Advertiser entered. Also, Tweeters who have had issues changing their tags in IE7/8 should be able to do this without problems now.