| On 01.19.10, In Google Analytics, Social Networks, Web analytics, by bhupendra |
Any system is bound to fail when the market condition changes. It was very likely for the Web Analytics tools to fail when Micro-blogging revolution happened. Earlier any spike in traffic was supposed to be click fraud or cyber attack. But with Twitter, it can happen any day.
One good article in a blog can go viral causing huge traffic often bringing down the server. The IT Team fights to
stabilize the system and often migrate to powerful server or move to cloud hosting. But marketers will have no numbers to show of a awesome traffic which made the blog popular. Google Analytics (and probably other analytics tools too) flag sudden rise in traffic as fraud and neglects it.
This is but not the problem of only Web Analytics Tools. If the traffic happens to come from one IP (due to single IP used in University or Company), hosting providers block the IP altogether. This shows that even the hosting providers are not aware of this new phenomena. It happened to us twice, and we finally migrated all our products to Amazon Cloud.
Coming back to Google Analytics, we use it for all our services including GlobalThoughtz. When tracked through Bit.ly or NXY.in, I get 100 to 400 clicks for all tweeted links. We write at least 10 articles per day, and I tweet them all. I also share those articles in Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn. When I see Google Analytics report, I feel sorry. It shows 1-3k visits on average day (including Google Traffic and StumbleUpon Traffic), when no articles becomes big hit in Digg or Stumble.
When I go back to NXY.IN and calculate, clicks to my URLS only is bigger than that number while there are many folks sharing links from GlobalThoughtz in Twitter. Where does others number go? I have no answer.
Analysis : Google has missed to upgrade
I feel, Google has missed to upgrade their system to include this behavior. I know it will be very difficult for them to track click fraud if they consider traffic spikes as original traffic, but there is no other way. Twitter traffic is genuine and human. They go to include this at any cost.
What is your experience? Have you tried comparing traffic shown by GA with that of Bit.ly and NXY.IN ? Do you have any other better way of knowing the Twitter Traffic apart from URL Shorteners? Please share over here as comments.
8 Responses
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by nicklazer007: Twitter Traffic Poorly Captured in Google Analytics http://bit.ly/6cGPKk…
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You would likely see a difference in your ability to track result if you built your URL’s (that you’re blogging and tweeting) using the Google URL builder located here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
Hope that helps! : )
Tom
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I would suspect a good amount of your social referrals are appearing as direct traffic. Many people are using desktop applications and phone apps for Twitter. These tools will not pass referrer information, thus dropping them in the direct traffic bucket.
All shortened links is possible to track in google analytics by specifiing name,date,whatever …and easy look in GA traffic sources like – Article20janNr01 / Twitter
[...] Twitter Traffic Poorly Captured in Google Analytics Share and [...]