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.
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 …
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 …
… making it for an existing rather than new domain …
Once created you need to hit Edit
Scroll down and add a new filter
Add the settings exactly as you see here.
Related posts:
- Google Paranoia and the Tin Foil Hat Club
- Is Alexa Relevant Now?
- Tracking Your Stats With Analytics Software
- Tweetmeme Tracks the Twittersphere
- Twitter Timer Sends Timed Twitter Reminders
Posted on May 22, 2009 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Google, Software Tools
Comments
16 Responses to “How to Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Twitter Traffic”
Leave a Reply
- The Excel Magician: 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to help you make Excel Magic
- Conversion Central: 101 Tools to Convert Video, Music, Images, PDF and More
- Using Mind Maps for Creativity, Note-Taking and Productivity
- Announcing the Creative Commons PDF Converter
- The Freelancer's Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need
- Adobe
- Blogging
- Cogniview
- Collaboration
- Content Licensing
- Copywriting
- Creative Commons
- Enterprise 2.0
- Excel
- Excel Template
- Excel Tips
- Funny
- IT
- Methodology
- Microsoft
- Office 2.0
- Productivity
- Sad
- Series
- Software Tools
- Uncategorized
- Video Tutorials
- Web 2.0
-
Keep this site going
Subscribe with RSS
[...] son site, c’est mieux ! L’article suivant vous propose une méthode (en anglais) pour suivre le trafic Twitter avec Google Analytics. L’article décrit la méthode pour associer un profil Analytics puis pour créer les filtres [...]
[...] Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Traffic [...]
Nice post…will certainly tweet…very useful for people to know how to set this up in order to know where there traffic is coming from. In this regard,Google analytics can do a very good job for you…!!!
[...] one more Twitter article – this one walks you through setting up campaigns in Google Analytics to track the success of your Twitter efforts. [...]
I followed the instructions and got a Cli.gs URL… now, where do I introduce it? If I do add it as a new profile, Google Analytics asks for a tracking code… Please help.
Thanks so much for this great post!
I followed your instructions on creating Google analytics profile. There’s one thing I’m missing, in field A–> extract A, you typed the name of twitter/ping/fm… I don’t use this service. Is it necessary? Is there any other address that can be put in place, such as twitter.com? If not, what additional service is necessary?
Please help
The cligs URL is what you tweet to your followers, if people click it then it shows up under your “campaign” traffic source
interesting stuff!
[...] Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Traffic [...]
[...] An obvious return on investment is more people reading your tweets and as a consequence checking out… – %extended% [...]
Interesting post, keep the good stuff coming, good content appreciated!
[...] Advanced Advanced use of Google Analytics and the new interface Track your Twitter posts How to Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Twitter Traffic : Codswallop Analytics and SEO How to use Google Analytics and Urchin to Improve Search Rankings – Panalysis [...]
[...] Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Twitter Traffic (Codswallop) [...]
Very useful, thank you
[...] How to Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Twitter Traffic : Codswallop [...]
[...] Depending on your tools you should be able to take the path the visitor arrived via and record that. Later you can see which source of visitors is worth the most and which either need to be optimized or dropped. The free and extremely powerful Google Analytics is a good start. Check out how I track my Twitter audience with Google’s software here. [...]