Comments on: How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think

By: mayank

mayank — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:28:41 +0000

My blog post http://zebugroup.com/blog/2009/06/link-tracking-lies-damn-lies-statistics/ addresses the reason why statistics provided by url shortening services may be misleading. This is what I was refering to in an earlier comment.

By: ginocarpio

ginocarpio — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:26:37 +0000

Hi Search Engine Land – Can you give me tips how to get more followers from Twitter?

By: shig

shig — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:30:18 +0000

I just launched a blog a couple of days ago, which I have promoted only using twitter. Bit.ly showed 6 clicks and GA showed 6 visitors, so they were matching up. I think where the confusion arises is with referrers. Of the 6 visitors, GA reported 1 as coming from twitter and 5 as being direct traffic. This means that one visitor clicked on the link using twitter on the web, and the other 5 were using non-browser twitter clients, which can’t act as referrers unless they register with bit.ly.

By: nickstamoulis

nickstamoulis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:11:04 +0000

Hi Danny, – This is a very interesting analysis! I too would like to get this code so I can test this as well. It is very interesting to see the quality (and sometimes lack of) of people that I have seen from Twitter…as far as I am concerned, Twitter is another great spot to develop and maintain relationships!

By: Jill Whalen

Jill Whalen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:03:26 +0000

Yep, what danmiller said.

Danny, you mentioned that you had Google tracking codes, but that’s not going to make it appear that you got referrers from Twitter since hardly anyone reads and clicks links from twitter.com itself.

What sort of code did you add? If you added campaign tracking codes then go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns and you should find your missing traffic in there.

@Missmcj you are correct that a lot of Twitter traffic does not convert and simply bounces, however, that depends on a number of things including who you have as followers, what you’re tweeting, where you’re sending them and what action you want the visitor to take (if any).

If you’re just sending people to an article, most will read it and leave, which is fine. I recently learned that Twitter can indeed convert if there’s an offer involved and the right people are reading your tweets. I was trying to unload the last of my SEO training DVDs at half price and tweeted about it one Sat. morning with the number that were left. I think I had about 5 or 6 left at the time, and within a few hours, they were all sold, all because of a bunch of tweets saying, “okay now only X left, get yours while you can” and that sort of thing!

By: tysonlee19

tysonlee19 — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:28:21 +0000

To add to what Dan said, you can use this Firefox extension to automatically add GA tracking parameters to your short URLs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11492

(Disclaimer: I wrote this extension, but it’s free, so enjoy!)

By: danmiller

danmiller — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:54:22 +0000

It looks like you’re basing your data from Google Analytics on referrer, which would also exclude regular browser traffic from third-party tools like TweetDeck.

You should add tracking parameters to your original URLs before shortening with bit.ly so they’ll appear as campaigns in GA. Or you can use simpler URL parameters if your analytics tool lets you analyze URL parameters directly, like LyrisHQ/ClickTracks (Disclaimer: I work for Lyris).

By: mayank

mayank — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:49:26 +0000

I completely agree with the post Danny. A lot of people are realizing the importance of twitter to direct traffic to their website. Techrunch having their own shortend url domain name or recent talk by Fred Wilson at 140conf is a good example. But I think what Andrew Cohen is saying is also quite valid. Bit.ly essentially counts the number of GET’s for the shortened URL. This can be from your browser/twitter client expanding in the background, or loads of crawlers dereferencing the URL to index the target page. I think if you have a huge followers to whom you have tweeted your blog, bit.ly will invariably give a huge hit. The reality however maybe otherwise. Hence the statistics from bit.ly has to be taken with a grain of salt.

By: PosiTracker

PosiTracker — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:33:06 +0000

Beyond non tracked traffic, there’s traffic developed from websites that publish twitter feeds…

By: Missmcj

Missmcj — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:03:42 +0000

I believe you entirely that Twitter generates a lot of traffic (or can do), but does it convert? I’ve heard and seen a lot of it being low quality. What have you seen? Would it be possible that your missing 200 went into the Direct Traffic” pool? This is probably because of the APIs being used which I’m sure you know :)

I’m really interested in social media traffic, especially Twitter because it’s so hard to measure, and also how do you qualify reach? What is the ROI on it? It depends on what your intention is as well of course. Do you want new sign-ups/customers or are you looking to do customer service?

Liked this post !