Marketing Pilgrim

Ad.ly is an ad network for Twitter. You set your price and approve the targeted ads before they’re inserted (marked as ads) into your Twitter stream. And now, Ad.ly is adding analytics to its platform.

Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr to analyze participating publishers’ followers, as well as how they receive ads.

The analytics offer information on user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly founder Sean Rad said the analytics, “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.”

As with all user-based social media advertising, there have been a number of ethical and practical questions floating around Ad.ly. Would a service like this increase the noise in the stream? Would it turn off or even drive away followers? Now users are better equipped to understand how their followers interact with their sponsored tweets.

What do you think? Would you use Ad.ly? What kind of analytic data would you need to help you evaluate the service?