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Track your Twitter Tracks: New Analytics Tool for Twitter

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Can you track your Twitter tracks?

The biggest questions people who are doing business on Twitter have is how much traffic are they getting from Twitter and what is the ROI? When it comes to marketing, tracking your ROI is always a challenge, unless you are following a simple chain like link – click- sale. But lets face it, most sales are not that simple, because most of us don’t just buy something the first time we see it. We all like to browse and look around, read reviews, and get to know the product or brand. So if you can’t always track link – click – sale then the next step of tracking ROI is tracking the amount of traffic you are pushing to your site.

The great thing about Twitter traffic is that it is qualified. This means that the traffic coming from your Twitter clicks are people who are interested in what you have to offer. They are clicking because they are interested and therefore far more likely to buy what you are selling. Great! So how much Twitter traffic are you generating?

That is an excellent question and until this week, that was not a question easily answered.

Twitter is coming out with their own web analytics. This will let you track your Twitter traffic, see how well your website Twitter integration is working, and see how your website links are being spread across Twitter. The new tool will help give you a much clearer picture of your true Twitter traffic and how well your marketing efforts are working.

Currently the tool is only available to a select few, but it is expected to start rolling out to the rest of us over the next few weeks.

Will this replace tools like bit.ly and google analytics? Not likely. But it will be another tool in the analytics arsenal that will help you get the most from your social marketing.

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Tracking Twitter Traffic

Twitter AnalyticsThe biggest question in adult is how can your measure your ROI from Twitter. Traffic is the main answer for that question. But how do you track twitter traffic? Well the short answer is you can’t, or at least not completely. The longer answer is, yes there are tools to use and Twitter just made it a lot easier.

Shortners

The easiest way to track traffic from your Twitter account is to use a shortner. Bit.ly, Goo.gl, Ow.ly are a few of the common link shortners that will also give you analytics. Personally I prefer bit.ly. I like the analytics they give. They let you know where you traffic is coming from and how many unique people are clicking your links. If you are fastidious, you can even check what time of day people were clicking if you look at the past 24 hours. Goo.gl has obvious benefits as far as SEO (though bit.ly is run through google analytics, and also receives SEO benefit), though I am not as fond of their reporting system. Ow.ly is great for those of you who use Hootsuite to manage your Twitter accounts.

When you use a shortened link in your tweets, and someone clicks that link, it is very easy to track it through the analytics of the shortner. However, this does not account for all twitter traffic. You will also get traffic from your profile, from other people tweeting your links and from brand recognition.

Direct Traffic

This is the traffic that is going directly to your website. This could be from the link on your profile, or if you are putting your direct link in your tweets. This could also be from people typing in your URL directly into their browser.

Making it Easier

The bigger problem with tracking twitter traffic is through your analytics. When you are looking at your analytics though a site like Google Analyitics or Statscounter the traffic from Twitter was not always being credited from Twitter depending on the the device being used. For instance if someone when to your site from twitter, but they were using a mobile device, your analytics would likely report that it was coming from a mobile device and not Twitter, even though it was coming from both. Or worse, you would not show a Twitter referal at all, it would show up as direct traffic.

Twitter is now shortening all links that are 20 characters or more with their t.co link shortner. This is meant to help with tracking traffic. It will also allow the analytics providers to properly attribute their traffic sources.

 

Though this newly integrated Twitter shortner is meant to help track twitter traffic, it is in part part of Twitters ongoing efforts to replace the need for third party apps. Though it is unlikely that t.co will replace bit.ly anytime soon. For one, the true analytics of t.co is only available to a small selection of developers and not available to the public. So the only way to view link analytics is through your website analytics provider. For many marketers that is simply not enough.

On the plus side, in your analytics you should be able to see what t.co is directing traffic to your site. This means that you can track your site traffic down to a specific tweet, and that is a huge plus for marketers.

So now we just have to wait for the release of the full t.co analytics to see if they will get rid of the need for third party shortners.

Since the release of the t.co analytics, many webmasters are already reporting sales and traffic coming from twitter from previously unassigned sources.

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SEO vs. Social Media: The Traffic Throw Down

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Click-throughs and stickiness are two paramount issues for web businesses. Click-throughs are the number of people who click on a link, and stickiness is the amount of time someone stays on your site.  There is always contradictory information about the issues of sticky click-throughs and social media.  Some people say that social media is not as good as traditional SEO.  Some people say that it is better.  I am here to tell you that they are both right.

Xbiz just posted a story reporting that social media generates less traffic than search. When you dig deeper, the breakdown is not as simple as that. There was a huge variance according to industry.  For instance, the study showed that 42% of new visitors to news sites came from social media, but for sports sites it was only 5%. Overall search traffic still dominated the majority of unique visitor traffic, however social media unique visitor traffic, while only 11%, was on the rise.

What Xbiz did not highlight was that the study was not specifically related to Adult, and it does not have any figures that highlight the trends in Adult Industry. It was a look at all web traffic to all kinds of sites.

The study was conducted by Outbrain, a company which provides widgets to publishers, designed to keep readers on their sites longer. What the study also published was the chart of the top traffic sources for websites:

Top 20 Traffic Sources from Outbrain

Notice that Facebook is in the top 5 and Twitter is in the top 10.

What they also did not tell you is there is no mention at all of the Adult Industry. In fact, when you look at the findings it actually looks unlikely that they considered Adult entertainment at all.

Does this make the study irrelevant to Adult? No. It is still relevant to some extent – what it does tell you is that SEO is still an important aspect for creating a strong web presence.  In fact, SEO is relevant for social media as well.  Social media is about relationships; SEO is about clicks.

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