With over 100 million active users worldwide, there is little doubt that Twitter is capable of driving large quantities of traffic to all types of websites. Although Twitter provides businesses with the opportunity to share content and drive traffic, it has been difficult to measure the true amount of traffic that Twitter sends to a website. Christopher Golda, the co-founder of BackType and member of Twitter’s product team, said:
“Twitter is a powerful platform for websites to share their content, and drive traffic and engagement. However, people have struggled to accurately measure the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to their websites, in part because web analytics software hasn’t evolved as quickly as online sharing and social signals.”
Twitter Web Analytics, which was driven by the acquisition of BackType in July, will seek to alleviate the problem Golda mentions. It will provide website owners with three key pieces of information:
- How website content is being shared on Twitter
- The quantity of traffic Twitter is sending to their website
- Determine the effectiveness of the “Tweet This” button integration
Twitter web analytics, which will be available to all website owners in the next several weeks, is currently only available to a small pilot group of Twitter partners. Although Golda did not state an exact timeframe, he indicated that Twitter is committed to releasing Twitter Web Analytics API for developers.
In addition to the addition of Twitter Analytics, Twitter recently announced the inclusion of promoted tweets within non-followers Twitter streams and the addition of five new languages.
[Sources Include: Twitter Blog & ZDNet]
