Omikron Media

Twitter Traffic Going Unnoticed

Are you gaining traffic to your site from Twitter? Are you measuring your traffic through an Analytics program like Google Analytics or Omniture? Well, according to Stan Pugsley, director of business intelligence for iCrossing, up to 70% of referral traffic from Twitter goes unnoticed by analytics applications.

“The problem is not with the web analytics tools, but with the Twitter applications like Tweetdeck and Twhirl that are not based in an Internet Browser,” says Pugsley. Apparently links within these programs are counted as direct traffic rather than referrals. Pugsley explains, “When a user clicks through a link in a tweet, those applications do not register a referring URL that can be picked up by the destination website. It appears that they are coming directly to the site. According to TweetStats, only 31.7% of tweets originate from twitter.com, and those are the visitors that can be tracked back to tweets.”

Is Twitter providing more quality traffic than we originally thought? Since there is no way to analyze your direct traffic – not that I know of at least – we can’t accurately analyze whether or not these third party applications really are providing any sort of quality traffic. I wonder how popular programs like Tweetdeck and Twhirl really are, and whether or not they provide quality traffic.

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