search campaign

January 20, 2009

Twitter and Analytics

For those marketers who are using analytics packages as a tool in managing their businesses I have come across several items of interest that deserve your attention. This post is on Twitter analytics. This post by Anil Batra outlines some Twitter Analytic strategies.

“There is a lot of discussion recently about how to measure authority, influence etc. on Twitter. There are a lot of tools popping up which claim to give some kind of score to help you measure you (or anyone else) against everybody else. This post is not about those tools and which ones I like (more on that later). This post is about things that we can track for sure.

There are millions of Twitter users who are tweeting every day, hoping and assuming that there tweets are being read by their followers. We can’t track all tweets and find out if they are being read but if you are one of those who post a link in your tweets then you are in luck. This post will show you how to track URLs posted in your tweets so that you can determine for sure if anybody is reading those tweets and also what kind of tweets from you are getting the most attention.

There are two types of URLs you post in Twitter

1. URL to your site
2. URLs to third party sites

1. URLs to you site – When you post a link to your site on twitter, you can treat it as a campaign just like a banner or search campaign. Add the campaign tracking codes compliant with your web analytics tool so that you can see the visits, page views, conversions and other web analytics data when a visitors clicks on your tweeted link and arrives on your site.

Example:

I use Google Analytics (GA) and you wanted to post a link to http://AnilBatra.com/, instead of just posting http://AnilBatra.com/ in my tweets, I add GA campaign parameters to the URL being posted.
utm_campaign, utm_medium and utm_source are three query parameters that GA uses for campaign tracking.

Link to Be Tweeted: http://AnilBatra.com

Adding GA Parameters: http://AnilBatra.com/?utm_campaign=watweets&tum_medium=twitter&utm_source=011909tweet

Now when I use WebTrends for Web Analytics then I use something like

Adding WebTrends Paramater: http://AnilBatra.com/?wt.mc_id=011909tweet. Where WT.mc_id is the Webtrends campaign tracking paramter.
You can use which ever web analytics tool you like, the key is adding the campaign tracking parameters the URL to be tweeted. It is that simple.

2. URLs to third party sites– Quite often tweeters post links to sites for which they don’t have access to the web analytics reports. For example, you posting a link to my blog http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/, you don’t have access to my Web Analytics Reports. As a results you have no idea how many people click though to the link that you tweeted.
For such tracking I like a utility called CLIGS http://cli.gs (Note: I have no affiliate with this tool). This tool creates a short URL for any URL that you want to tweet. It than also provides you the clicks on that links as well as other stats such as
* Geo Locations of visitors

* Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too!

For the sites that I have access to the web analytics data, I create a tracking url as I showed above (1) and then use CLIGS to shorten the URL (2), this provides me both CLIGS and Web Analytics data for analysis.

Apart from tracking on links the other ways to determine if your tweets are getting attention is to see the number of Retweets you get, direct messages and @replies you get. I will cover those in my future blog post.”

Another excellent site for tweaking of websites, especially wordpress is Joost de Walk’s Blog. He also has a post on analytics and Twitter Yoast on Twitter-Analytics