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.
ayb - who has written 6 posts on EasyTweets. This post was written by:
April 6th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Question re: the Analytics URL builder. This won’t help me with shortening the url, is that right? I’ve added parameters to the end of my url using the url builder, but will that information get lost if I then shorten my url using ow.ly or cli.gs? Will those shortened urls still show up as direct visits even though I have added the parameters? Thanks!
April 6th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Yes it will work when you shorten the URL.
Our feed tracking feature works by adding those parameters to the end of the URL before shortening the URL; when the user clicks the short link the parameters are included when they visit your site.