How to burn $20 on Twitter with $10 real CPC

I heard twitter advertising was pretty good, so I decided to give it a shot.

Why I try new advertising channels, I typically spend $20 to be fair.

I also run a personal link shorten-er, and decided to use that to track my CTR.

In about 30 minutes 20$ bought me 31 engagements (all clicks in this case) on a promoted tweet.

At ~$0.65 ecpe, this sounds like an awesome deal. Obviously the quality of the traffic won't be as good as search traffic.

However, I made sure my ad was at least geographically targeted.

Reality:

Of the 31 reported engagements, my link shorten-er showed 10 clicks.

2 were from self proclaimed bots (Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TweetmemeBot/3.0; +http://tweetmeme.com/))

6 others were also from bots, they had these user agents:

Ruby

Kimengi/nineconnections.com

MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com

JS-Kit URL Resolver, http://js-kit.com/

(twice) UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)

At the end of the day, only two other clicks came from realistic useragent/ips that could be construed as a real person.

Real Cost:

$10 CPC

conclusion:

Totally not worth it. Twitter needs to get their shit straight and resolve their blatant click fraud OR provide the real data behind those engagements (useragents, precise IP based geolocation, referrers.)