Comments on: Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think?

By: zumbaba

zumbaba — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:41:34 +0000

Hi Danny, thanks for this very interesting article though I am still scratching my head to figure out why I have a 7000% discrepancy between Bit.ly and Google Analytics…Does this happen with other URL shorteners like Tiny?

By: danhristov

danhristov — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:46:25 +0000

Danny, I measured many visitors on different social media networks, not only on Twitter. I used web measurement tool RoiWatcher from http://www.Deskgod.com and with this tool i clearly see that no one form these visitors didn’t reach my goals.

By: Mayank Sharma

Mayank Sharma — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:00:56 +0000

Danny, I think I have come up with a simple solution to remove the counting of bots/spiders/twitter clients/browser plugins from bit.ly’s reported statistics. details are at http://bit.ly/L1ys4 . I am running that experiment on the blog right now and should know the results in a week’s time. Meanwhile would you like to run a similar experiment on your next post?

By: znmeb

znmeb — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:08:40 +0000

Well …

* First of all, no two tools are going to count exactly the same events unless they are designed with the exact same algorithm. In short, you need to approach every vendor / tool maker in the entire analytics space and get their algorithm definition if you want to make sense of the metrics they’re reporting.

* At the highest level, you probably want to be measuring return (in revenue dollars) per unit of effort: hours spent tweaking the search properties of the web site, time spent in Twitter conversations, etc. The intermediate stuff in the funnel probably matters somewhat, but I think what you really want to know is “should I spend the time optimizing for search, or should I spend the time tweeting, networking on LinkedIn or Facebook, etc.”

* If the analytics can give you correct *proportions* — what fraction of your incoming unique visitors came from social media and what proportion came from search — that’s probably a lot more valuable than the absolute numbers. And if they can give you paths — do Twitter vistors hit different pages than search visitors — that’s also valuable.

* I think rather than experiment with the things external to your site, like which tools count what, time is better spent by picking one tool, sticking with it, and doing the experimentation *on* the site. What works best in achieving the overall goals for all visitors, no matter where they came from.

By: tigertech

tigertech — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:37:11 +0000

>(mother’s cookie site:daggle.com was the search, which was me locating
>the article. Oddly, this request does NOT appear in the raw log files).

That’s most likely ’cause your computer just served you the page out of its browser cache without contacting the server… but then it ran the JavaScript on the page and thereby logged another hit over at Google.

– Rob

By: Terry Whalen

Terry Whalen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:47:15 +0000

Eric,

When you say tweeted URLs remain valuable as quality signal over time, are you saying that there is an SEO benefit to twitter even though the data shows no twitter permalinks? Would love any additional clarity on this. Thanks!

Danny, thanks for the post.

By: seotoys

seotoys — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:03:00 +0000

It does look interesting revealing the truth about twitters.. Thanks for uncovering this important fact.

By: Eric Ward

Eric Ward — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:13:02 +0000

I’d been noticing twitter URLs showing up in my client citation (backlink) analysis data. Since by sheer laziness I have years and years of past client link analysis data, I dumped it all into a seperate directory and searched through literally millions of links looking to see if I could spot any useful backlink analysis trends for tweeted URLs. So far, it’s interesting that twitter permalink URLs (aka individual status update pages) have yet to show up among crawled backlink data, but the main Twitter username URL does show up. In one case from this past May, Google showed 69 unique twitter accounts as having tweeted a particular URL, but none of those 69 were shown to me as twitter permalinks. All were shown as twitter.com/userame, instead of twitter.com/username/status/194816….. Since I can see Twitter does in fact index tweets, and I can also see every URL I ever tweeted, this makes me think tweeted URLs, as they age off the page and become less likely to be clicked, remain silently valueable as quality signal over time.

By: André Scholten

André Scholten — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:29:38 +0000

it looks like mainly non-javascript browsers are not measured. Have you tried to add an extra Google Analytics tracking code that is generated by php, that will measure the non-javascript visits also.

Dutch explanation about that technique is here: http://andrescholten.nl/google-analytics-zonder-javascript/

By: nickstamoulis

nickstamoulis — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:33:19 +0000

Wow, this is great info to learn…I am going to start digging a bit more through our log files to try to uncover some additional data. Also, thanks for pointing out the Snip-n-Tag plugin for Firefox as well…