• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 11, 2010

Analytics continue to become an important part of Twitter's services. The company has acquired the cloud-hosted Web analytics application Trendly from Smallthought Systems. While the platform gives Twitter a way to dig deeper into traffic data, apparently Promoted Tweet advertisers like Virgin America give a thumbs-up to the acquisition, too.

 

The acquisition brings the folks at Smallthought into Twitter's analytics team to help integrate Trendly's technology and build out its core platform. The move aims to help marketers "distinguish signal from noise" as data feeds into Google Analytics.

Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner says the company continues to roll out Phase One of Promoted Tweets. Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America, with more to come, are participating in campaigns. So far, feedback as been positive, not only from advertisers, but also people who send and read tweets, she says.

Similar to other advertising campaigns and programs, Promoted Tweets rely on the ability for marketers to evaluate the return on investment. So ROI becomes crucial for marketers at companies like Virgin America who have added Promoted Tweets to their media buy.

Abby Lunardini, Virgin America's director of corporate communications, says the airline launched its flight to Canada in April on Twitter using Promoted Tweets, without traditional advertising. It turns out that produced one of the highest sales days to date, she says. The company monitors responses from the tweets, as well as data through analytics.

Marketers at Virgin America look at impressions, engagement, clicks, and followers to analyze tweets through Twitter analytics, but also stats from Omniture and bit.ly to determine the success of campaigns.

Smallthought's technology supports Ruby on Rails, which Twitter uses. The Twitter group became impressed with the company's frequent contributions to the Ruby and the Smalltalk development communities, so they bought them. The company likely used either the millions received in funding from venture capitalist throughout the past few years, or revenue generated from deals that integrate chatter streams into real-time search results on Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Twitter recently reported it tracks more than 65 million tweets daily tweeted by about 190 million users, up from 50 million in February. ComScore estimates 83.6 million worldwide unique visitors to Twitter in April and 23.8 million U.S. visitors in May.

Last year, Twitter acquired Mixer Labs, which supports location-based technology through GeoAPI.