Twitter recently announced that they are introducing Twitter Analytics. This new analytics is going into private beta and will be unrolled to everyone “as soon as possible,” so no timeframe for full release. The new Twitter analytics will allow internet marketers to better measure the exact impact of Twitter sharing on their site’s traffic.
Here is a screenshot of one tab of the actual Twitter analytics dashboard from their TechCrunch demonstration:
According to the Twitter presentation at TechCrunch, the analytics will offer the following information:
- Total number of tweets that include a link to your site
- Total number of clicks on those links
- A near-realtime list of every tweet including a link to your site, which you can retween or respond to directly from the analytics
- A leaderboard showing the pages of your site, how many tweets including links to those pages are out there, how many clicks each link received, and the total number of clicks per linked tweet
At the presentation Twitter pointed out that due to the use of the t.co wrapper for Twitter links they no have information about 95% of the Twitter interactivity out there, but there are still some blind spots. In particular third party sites that aggregate tweet information won’t be tracked via these analytics.
Twitter also made a point of mentioning that they spent a lot of effort to remove spambots and other automated pings and they have high confidence that these numbers are an accurate portraying of the number of people interacting with tweets.
The Twitter presentation — and indeed the Twitter analytics — really push the use of the Tweet button, which they report is currently active on three million websites.
The Twitter analytics sound like an exciting way to measure the effectiveness of Twitter and I only hope that is launches publicly in the near future. Twitter has also promised an API with the analytics so that third party analytic sources can incorporate the Twitter analytics in with custom Twitter/social media analytic software.