How to Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Twitter Traffic

How do you know if your Twitter activity is paying off?

An obvious return on investment is more people reading your tweets and as a consequence checking out your website. This certainly does work, but apart from a gut feel that you are gaining visibility, how do you know exactly what you are doing is working, and in particular, the specific attempts that worked and those that fell flat?

Luckily the free and fabulous Google Analytics can help you out …

Track URLs With Campaigns

The problem is Twitter users rarely use the Twitter.com website to read and tweet. This means there are many many desktop and mobile applications, and these applications do not send referrer information to Google Analytics.

Google has a special URL builder designed to help you construct campaign URLs for advertising tracking, but we can use them for our Twitter linkage just the same.

The neat thing about hooking everything up in analytics is that you can track these visits all the way through to conversion, either as a subscriber or to see if the Twitter visitor buys from you.

Tool: URL Builder - Analytics Help

Of course this tool produces huge URLs, so your next job is to shorten down to preserve more of those precious 140 characters that we are allowed for each tweet.

I use a service called Cli.gs – interestingly Cli.gs also tracks clicks, or I should say attempted clicks as the number who reach the destination never matches what the service claims to have sent …

My Cligs

Now this is not an entirely clear picture because it only tracks clicks on the URLs that you have created. How can we track our total Twitter traffic?

Advanced – Google Analytics Profile and Filter

What about the traffic that we did not initiate, but came from Twitter and other microblog services?

To get around this we need to detect them and aggregate using Analytics Profiles and Filters.

First you need to add a new profile …

Analytics Settings - Google Analytics

… making it for an existing rather than new domain …

Create New Website Profile - Google Analytics

Once created you need to hit Edit

Analytics Settings - Google Analytics

Scroll down and add a new filter

Profile Settings - Google Analytics

Create New Filter - Google Analytics

Add the settings exactly as you see here.

Productivity in 140 Characters

Since the beginning of this year I have had a growing desire to make it my mission to be truly productive.

That sentence in itself is a lesson in productivity. Note I did not say I had made it my mission, or actually made progress. I said “growing desire”. This means it is still largely a dream rather than something I have actually achieved :)

The truth is I have made some progress, along with my friend Cindy King who has been helping to keep me on track.

My productivity systems are coming together gradually.

Where I made a break through though was to focus on providing “value”, not “work”. Focusing on effort or work got me into trouble where I nearly burned out (more than once). By making sure I put value first, with reward later, I have been much happier and actually created better results for people.

A subtle difference, and maybe being pedantic, but makes a profound difference to the way I approach things :)

I’ve also discovered it helps to go with what comes natural to you rather than what other folks think you “should” be doing.

Due to some forced offline bouts, speaking engagements and recent trips, I have had a massive email productivity panic and this forced me to sort out my inbox for once and for all. First had to go all the non-essential email lists, either unsubscribed or filtered into folders.

In addition to “nuking the noise” I created two folders called “_action” and “_read” (the underscore puts those at the top of the folder list in my email client).

So now when I check my email I either

  1. Delete
  2. Mark as spam
  3. Move to read – once read they are either deleted or archived in particular folders
  4. Move to action – stuff that needs me to do more than read

Those actions are then part of my to-do list for the day, even if the action is that I need to acknowledge receipt.

I am still working on adding rules, for example I have a folder for lists that is for emails from list that are not noisy but still don’t require me to read as they come in.

Of course I have also bought the famous “GTD” book that everyone bangs on about, but I have yet to read it (too disorganized to find time to read the ultimate organization book!).

So now I am ready to learn from you guys, and here we get to the point of the subject line :) I asked on twitter if you have productivity tips, and I would like to open it up to you too if you have anything to add. Here are the responses so far:

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Get Free Content for Your Blog

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Click here to add your details and be on your way to getting some free, expert content for your site!

We have already written guest posts for several happy bloggers. Obviously there are only so many topics that we can write about that will be relevant to the work Cogniview does, but we have so far written about software tools, PDFs and ebooks, business and productivity. So while we can’t guarantee that we will write something for everyone, we will think very hard to see if we can come up with something brilliant for you, so don’t delay, fill the form out now :)