14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is a great way of reaching out to your audience and sharing your content. But it's hard to measure the impact of each tweet and of Twitter in general on a website's traffic. There are ways of knowing how much a link is shared, using a ULR shortener like Bit.ly for example, but now Twitter is introducing the first, official, web analytics tool.
"Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites," Twitter's Christopher Golda announced.
"Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July," he said.
Twitter Web Analytics provides accurate data straight from the source, since Twitter, obviously, has access to everything that happens on the site.
With the tool, users will be able to check out where the traffic is coming from but also who is sharing links to their sites.
This is important since, there was no way of knowing who shares your content, outside of checking out each incoming link manually. With this data, you can see who are your biggest fans, but also who manages to drive up the most attention to your site.
The analytics tool also displays the amount of traffic coming from Twitter to your site on any given day. This data is compared to the number of tweets linking to your site on that day, so you can get an estimate of the tweet-to-click ratio.
Another metric that the Web Analytics tool tracks is tweet button integration. This will enable website owners to know how effective the button is and how many people use it, as opposed to simply copying the link and tweeting manually.
Twitter Web Analytics is in testing with a small number of websites, but it will be made available to all website owners in the next few weeks, Twitter said.