Twitter is about to make it a whole lot easier to see just how well your social media marketing campaign is working. After years of relying on third-party, backdoor or inefficient ways of measuring the traffic Twitter generates, the service has started rolling out a web analytics tool that allows site owners to see exactly how much of a boost they’re getting form the short-burst messaging service.
In a blog post last week, the company said analytic software had been lagging behind the evolution in online sharing. That meant if you wanted to get a sense how popular your Twitter links were — if you were say, tweeting a link to a company blog post or advertising a sale — you had to resort to other analytics systems, which are often incomprehensive or unreliable. For instance, third-party apps such as Tweetdeck show how many clicks a link received, but the count is often lost when your link gets reposted or retweeted. Your own metrics on a site won’t identify all the sources as coming directly from Twitter, either: Tweetdeck links sometimes show up as from “t.co” while traffic from app Twitterific show up as “iconfactory.com.”
But now, with the acquisition of BackType in July, the company is able to catch up. You will soon be able to see not only how much your content is being shared across Twitter, but also the ratio of tweets to clicks, how much traffic came from a Twitter button on your site and get a 30-day comparison.
The service was offered to a small pilot group last week and will be rolled out to all website owners over the next few weeks. Twitter also plans to release a Twitter Web Analytics API fore developers who want to incorporate Twitter data in their products.
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