13 replies to this topic

[nitz]

What are different ways of tracking benefits of twitter on our site. Stats..to be precise...Can anyone guide me...I have come after a long time on this forum ..

Edited by nitz, 15 January 2009 - 06:18 AM.

[copywriter]

Since this topic doesn't deal with copywriting, I am moving it to the Web Analytics and Tracking forum. Someone here will surely be able to help you.

[Jill]

Actually, I'm going to move it to the social media forum

In answer to your question, it depends on what you want to track.

You can track links that you tweet by using a URL shortening service such as Cli.gs which provides stats.

You can track direct traffic from Twitter via your web analytics software such as Google Analytics. Go to referring pages and look for Twitter.

You can track how much people are talking about you on Twitter by gong to Twitter Search and searching for your name, your brand, your company, your URL and anything else that may be relevant.

You can also create feeds of those Twitter Searches and monitor them that way.

Those are just a few of the ways you can track. There are also external apps that provide other things to track such as how many followers you get a day and how many followers unfollow.

[copywriter]

LOLOL - Round and round and round she goes and where she stops only Jill knows!

[nitz]

Indeed a helpful reply...Thanks Jill..

[Andy_Seo]

Yes I agree, good stuff. I think the BBC show a good example of how to utilise the your information to create a useful twitter feed. They use the META description data to produce a brief summary of the story and as most of their descriptions are under 140 characters - it works a treat.

[blackirish.ken]

We track conversions with our in-house analytics, and right now our Twitter profiles are converting better than our PPC.

[Jill]

And even better tracking can be had when you append Google Analytics tracking codes to the end of your URLs if they're pointing to something on your site.

Hadn't even thought of that before until Randy mentioned it to me once! It's pretty awesome as you can make campaigns. Plus, you can append the URLs first, before you shorten them and nobody has to see the long ugly messy one!

[davidbrett]

Hi All,

I set up a twitter account a month ago and I have been making a handful of posts.

I have only 10 - 15 followers but according to my analytics stats I have not had any referrals.

While not hugely surprising as I don't have a large following yet I thought it best to do a few test clicks on the links I had inserted yesterday.

I have looked at Google Analytics this morning and I am still seeing 0 referrals from Twitter.

Has any one else had a similar issue?

[Randy]

Remember that if your followers are using some sort of twitter client and/or if you're using a url shortening service you probably won't see the referrals show up as a twitter referral. In fact the url shortening services often won't show any referral because most of those use some type of redirect status code, which would wipe out referral information even if the user clicked through from your twitter page.

This conundrum a friend was running into is why I took on the little project of working out a solution for twitter campaign tracking Jill mentioned above. The details and scriptlets are here if you use Google Analytics for your statistics and need 'em.

[Gerry White]

Should you do that (Google analytics tracking?) it is something I would have suggested in the past, but I keep seeing tweets being indexed and would hate to dilute the juice (unless of course you use the canonical tag)....

I have seen some reasonably impressive traffic from twitter, not 'massive' but good - I think if your in the right niche it would work amazingly ... I was just looking at a very impressive UK affiliate site, aimed at home furnishings (no names) but they have over a thousand followers!

(I have 27, and most of them are trying to sell some sort of twitter spamming service)...!

[davidbrett]

Thanks Randy,

I am going to take a look at the link you sent on.

I will test it out over the weekend.

[Randy]

Gerry is right on the link juice passing. Though honestly you're not going to get the link juice anyway if you use one of the url shortening services and they use a 302 redirect.

In any case it's pretty simple to fix on the back end. A simple .htaccess instruction to detect one of the query string variables, then redirect (via 301) back to the base page should do the trick if you're concerned about losing link pop flow through tagged links. Setting it up to trigger on the query string variable means you could have one .htaccess to control every page you ever tagged.

[Jill]

Should you do that (Google analytics tracking?) it is something I would have suggested in the past, but I keep seeing tweets being indexed and would hate to dilute the juice (unless of course you use the canonical tag)....

There's no juice, they're nofollow links.

Use a service like cli.gs and you can measure your clicks that way. That and creating Google Analytics campaigns as Randy mentioned is a great way to monitor your twitter traffic.