EasyTweets » Featured http://blog.easytweets.com Easy Twitter Marketing Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:13:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 How To: Track Twitter Traffic In Google Analytics http://blog.easytweets.com/how-to-track-twitter-traffic-in-google-analytics/ http://blog.easytweets.com/how-to-track-twitter-traffic-in-google-analytics/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:34:10 +0000 ayb http://blog.easytweets.com/?p=13 Although many people still use Twitter.com, a large percentage of users do not. They could be using EasyTweets, or TweetDeck, or an iPhone app, etc. This makes it difficult to track who is coming to your site, and what they are doing when they get there.

]]> Although many people still use Twitter.com, a large percentage of users do not. They could be using EasyTweets, or TweetDeck, or an iPhone app, etc. This makes it difficult to track who is coming to your site, and what they are doing when they get there.

If they are on a web site, your analytics will show that site (such as easytweets.com) as the referring domain. But if they are using a client app such as TweetDeck or Twhirl, these visitors will show as direct traffic. And as Joost points out, you are probably not properly tracking more than half of your web site’s visitors:

I’ve heard people say it’s up to 80 or even 90%, although Twitter Stats seems to report it as around 50%, and Twitstat.com as 60%. So you’re getting a lot of clicks that look like “direct traffic” in your Analytics, but are in fact, not direct traffic. These people will behave differently than normal people who come to your site directly.

You can get stats about clicks from a URL shortener such as cli.gs. But what if you want to know what the visitors are actually doing? What if you want to track how many people actually joined your site, or signed up for your newsletter, or bought your product?

If you are using Google Analytics, the solution to all of this is to append UTM parameters to your web site URL. It breaks down as follows:

Parameter What it Means
utm_source Source of the traffic for this campaign. For example, a search engine, newsletter name, etc.
utm_medium Campaign medium. For example, pay per click or e-mail.
utm_term The keyword, in pay per click. (Not applicable for Twitter.)
utm_content Ad content. Used to differentiate different ad copy, etc.
utm_campaign Campaign name.


Google has a URL builder tool that you can use.

But what if you are promoting your blog on Twitter? How can you track Twitter traffic to your blog if you are using a tool to auto post your RSS feed?

EasyTweets can do it for you (if you’re a subscriber). Just enter the UTM parameters when you add (or edit) an RSS feed. The UTM parameters will be added automatically, prior to shortening the link, whenever there are new feed items:

In order for Google Analytics to see the UTM parameters, you must be using your blog’s actual RSS feed – i.e. NOT a feed from Feedburner, Yahoo Pipes, etc.