Tracking twitter is a tricky business. Unlike other social media most users don't use the web interface, instead preferring to use clients such as TweetDeck or Twitterberry.
The use of third-party clients makes tracking traffic from Twitter quite challenging. In Google Analytics all traffic that originating from these applications will be counted as 'direct traffic'. This means that you wont be able differenciate Twitter visits, and as such you are blind to the success (or otherwise) your tweeting has had in achieving your business goal.
Leading url shorteners such as bit.ly provide analytics showing the number of clicks on a certain URL, but that has little relationship to the site. There are any number of bots out there which 'click' on the link only to get the resultant url. Not only that, every time your super advanced Twitter clients lengthens the URL for you, that's a 'click'.
One account we had just set up instantly recorded 20+ clicks, despite having zero followers, and another tweet had 500+ clicks according to bit.ly, but only 300 or so pageviews. On further analysis it appears that the more you get re-tweeted, the more your figures are inflated. Not bad if you want to show off to your boss, not good if you want to actually track your success in a realistic way.
Measurement was a focus at last night's Social Media Club Sydney with good reason. For publishers, marketers and other people using Twitter as a mechanism to drive traffic, it's important how much your efforts are making a difference to your overall traffic.
To track shortened URL's effectively with Google Analytics we need is to append our URL's with some variables that let us track every visitor coming from our tweets. We need to add something like this:
utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter
As a manual process this is not just boring and annoying, it's likely you wont do it it becomes too much of a pain in the ass. Unfortunately none of the big URL shortening services have an option to add this autmatically, so using it with clients and services such as Tweetdeck or Twitterfeed is not yet an option.
Luckily, some savvy internet types have done all the hard work for us, creating some lovely bookmarklets create (and tweet) urls that let you track all the Twitter love you might be getting. Yoast was the first on the scene with a basic bookmarklet for shortening service cli.gs, but TwiTips has to take the cake for providing some more refined options for the digital marketer with ever changing campaigns.
Simply drag the appropriate bookmarklets from below to your browsers toolbar for one click analytics shortening goodness.
Drag-and-drop bookmarklets:
Tweeburner bookmarklet
cligs bookmarklet code
Drag-and-drop bookmarklets with an initial dialog box prompting for the campaign name:
Tweetburner bookmarklet with custom campaign
cligs bookmarklet with custom campaign)
