How to monitor Twitter traffic with Google analytics and Tweetmeme

Does this sound familiar? Your posting your links to Twitter using a URL shortner like bitl.y but Google analytics doesn’t show any incoming traffic from twitter. It’s frustration because you know you blog posts are awesome, and there are millions of people clicking on the links. If they don’t their stupid, right?

What’s going on here, is bit.ly taking all my link love? are they somehow a black hole for links?

The answer yes and no. URL Shortners are taking your link love. Since pagerank is built on quality websites linking back to your website, bit.ly most definitely steals some of your link love. It’s not bit.ly’s fault though. The blogosphere is has turned to social networks for moving traffic around. Pagerank has become less important.

It’s all about the pageviews, baby!

the most popular blog button is easily the tweetmeme button. It’s easy to install and it’s rock solid, meaning I’ve never seen or heard of any issues with it. You will usually see it next to a Facebook like button, Google Buzz button, Digg button, etc…

Twitter is very popular, with a reported 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day. Of course, there are many people, me included that think the number is BS. There is countless spam bots and autoresponders, doing much of the tweeting. The human users are still in the millions though which makes Twitter a must use.

Twitter is not your typical website because the vast majority of Twitter users do not use the web. They use third party mobile and desktop apps. Therefore the referring traffic to your site it not seen as coming from Twitter. It mostly comes as direct traffic.

In order to monitor Twitter traffic you need to provide additional parameters to your links.  At the least you need to add a source identifier to your urls.

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_url = <?= the_permalink()?>?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter';
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_source = 'mattdunlap';
</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>

As you can see, all you have to do is add a querystring to your link for tweets. Now when someone clicks on your shortened URL, the traffic will be recorded properly. The example above will track the source (Where they came from), medium (What they came from), and campaign (I wanted them to come from). Hopefully by looking at the example you are getting some ideas of how to fine tune Google analytics. Maybe change the utm_medium to “social networks” and then make some links for facebook only. Adding UTM’s to your links is a great way for recording social media campaigns