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How to Track Twitter Clicks and Get Conversion Data

by hendrylee on January 23, 2009

How do you track what links are being clicked on on Twitter? Today Hendry Lee (follow him at @hendrylee) shares some tips on how to do it.

Much of Twitter is about communication with your peers and meeting new people. I’ve seen many social media marketers claim that in fact conversation is the only thing that matters in Twitter.

I won’t go into detail about it in this post, but no matter what people say, marketers can only track numbers. And without tracking, there is no way to measure how effective social media is to your business.

Based on the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter still continues to grow despite outages and other issues. Nielsen reported in October 2008 that Twitter is growing as much as 343% in 12 months.

Twitter’s growth and the ability to drive traffic via Twitter is two different things, but Jason Calacanis, for instance, blogged that Twitter was sending over 20,000 people a month to his web site Mahalo.com.

With that, I bet all marketers, webmasters and publishers will agree that they should take a very serious look at Twitter, especially if they want to tap into new source of audience and engage those users as part of their marketing activities.

The Problem with Tracking Traffic from Twitter

Before I start, let me elaborate a bit about the challenge for tracking Twitter. Feel free to skip this section if you already know it.

One of the greatest things about Twitter is the ability to post and receive updates from different medium, applications and devices. That makes it possible for Twitterers to engage in conversations no matter where they are and without disturbing their work flow too much.

With the flexibility comes the problem though. If your followers click on the link in your tweets to visit your site — in a browser, it leaves a trail. In HTTP, that trail is the Referer header.

A click on a tweet from the Twitter.com web site actually has the browser generate this as part of the HTTP request header:

Referer: http://twitter.com/hendrylee?page=6

By tracing the log file, using log analyzer such as Awstats (available via most web hosting control panel), or web stats package, you will be able to see exactly from which site or page your traffic comes from.

However, it doesn’t tell the whole story for the following reasons:

• Lack of Referer header for traffic from other Twitter clients. Desktop- and phone-based Twitter clients are popular. According to TweetStats, web accounts for about 51% of the whole Twitter apps, so where do the stats for the 49% go?. When someone clicks on your link, it will not carry the Referer header. Your log file and web stats are more likely to track this as direct traffic.
• Syndicated Twitter feed displays the wrong Referer information. As Twitter also has RSS feed, web publishers can syndicate it easily on their web sites, blogs, FriendFeed or even Facebook accounts. When someone clicks on the link in the tweet, the header contains a Referer line, but from the other web sites instead of Twitter.
• It doesn’t track traffic from RSS feed. If your followers decide to follow via RSS in their news readers, or if they subscribe to a keyword-search query via RSS, and then happen to click on the link in the tweet, it will be tracked as either direct traffic — if from a desktop RSS reader, or as traffic from online RSS reader in the Referer line.

How’s that for accuracy? If you are not yet tracking your Twitter traffic, chances are you underestimate the number of visitors that come as the result of your tweets.

Simple Approach to Tracking Twitter

The first solution is very simple. Use URL “shortener” service that supports tracking. Tweetburner is one of them.

ConclusionsNow that marketers begin to understand Twitter, and with the growth of the micro blogging platform itself, marketers and web publishers are starting to generate significant traffic from Twitter. With the above method, you will be able to at least track how many clicks are coming from Twitter beyond those from Twitter’s website. That means you are able to track clicks from syndicated Twitter RSS feeds, from desktop- and phone-based clients, and others as well.By setting up funnels and goals in your Google Analytics account, you will also be able to get user behavior and conversion data. With those numbers in hand, marketers can now measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and know where to spend their money and effort on.Final note: Still related to tracking, I’ve created a WordPress plugin that makes in-content RSS links trackable with Google Analytics. Currently FeedBurner only tracks clicks on the item title. When you create a blog post as part of a larger promotion, clicks on the call to action and other links within RSS feed — as a separate campaign — are not properly tracked. The plugin, which I called RSS Feed Campaign Tagger uses the same method I explained above to track links within your RSS feed.Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about social media tips on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog – Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to the blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

How to Track Twitter Clicks and Get Conversion Data