Haters, beware — It may be more useful than you think
Twitter is all the rage, but plenty of naysayers are hopping on the Twitter backlash, questioning the benefits marketers receive from being on the microblogging platform. You may want to turn their attention to a recent article in SearchEngineLand which shows Twitter could be underreported in Google Analytics data by as much as 1600 percent.
From SearchEngineLand:
“Based only on referrers, at best, Google or any analytics program would have said Twitter sent two visits. But because I used tracking codes, I was able to overcome the lack of referring data and see that Twitter (itself or via applications or web sites using Twitter data) sent nine visits. That means analytics packages might be undercounting Twitter visits by nearly 500 percent.”
“Meanwhile, Bit.ly was showing those 58 clicks to the page. Let’s say it wasn’t filtering out some of the robots. I can still see that there are 32 visits that the log files recorded, all with the tracking codes that never existed until I tweeted the link with them. So those are all Twitter-derived visits. That means an undercount by a standard analytics tool depending on referrer data by 1600 percent.”
SearchEngineLand has already pinged Google to find out what they’re doing about the problem, and outlines several ways to prevent the undercounting from affecting your referral stats.
[Lots more data and discussion at SearchEngineLand]
