Google has made no official statement regarding the program, but has already began testing the new ad format with a select number of advertisers, including Norway-based firm Qualité Search Marketing, who said it was invited by Google to join the beta test on May 7.
Magne Uppman, founder and managing director of Qualité, said his company has witnessed only “a modest boost” in followers as a result of the ads so far.
Google declined to deal with the program directly, but accepted that it was operating a number of experiments with different technology partners.
Ads are displayed in a box with the Twitter bird icon in the lower left-hand corner and the advertisers’ latest tweet in the center (as shown above). A button on the right reads “Follow on Twitter,” encouraging users to become a follower of the advertiser without leaving the page. Clicking on any other part of the ad directs the user to the advertiser’s Twitter page, however.
“To deliver more marketing opportunities for our advertisers to reach users in moments that are relevant and useful to them, we are currently testing different ways that allow advertisers to better update their ads in real time,” wrote a Google spokesperson in an e-mail message. “We are currently in a limited test with a small number of advertisers and publishers.”
Google is not the first to bring live Twitter feeds to display ads. Given that Microsoft’s Bing forged a similar deal with Twitter even before Google did, we suspect the search engine will shortly announce a Twitter-related advertising platform as well.