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Facebook (Insights) Fails…Again!

I am a geek. So I spend a lot of time pouring through data and looking at analytics. Its just what I do. If you have a Facebook page for your business or brand, you should be doing this too. Thankfully this is easily done through Facebook Insights. Insights is the reporting system for all you Facebook data. It tells you how many page views you had, who is clicking, liking, sharing. You can get age and gender demographics. How many times your story appeared in the newsfeed. How viral your content is. And a lot more. There is so much information in the downloaded excel spreadsheet that you go well into the double alphabet column. You can also view a synopsis of your Insights right on Facebook from you page. The link is on the left side menu, under your profile pic.

Normally insights is behind real time by 2 days. This is not a big deal. 2 days still gives you an accurate picture of what is happening with your page. However, for the past 2 weeks insights has pretty much been down. It has provided some spotty information, but for the most part it is not actually reporting anything useful. For a data geek like me, this has been enormously frustrating.

Thankfully, despite being quiet about it for the past few weeks, Facebook has finally admitted that they are aware of the problem and are considering it high priority.

Now, usually when their is a big FAIL on Facebook it is because they are making some changes to the site. Of course, they don’t let anyone know of any potential changes so when they drop and then the site is working again, we all get to have an “A-Ha” moment.

There is a marketing conference at the end of the month, so maybe they will be announcing some big new changes coming to the site.

Track your Twitter Tracks: New Analytics Tool for Twitter

Sexy Twitter Bird Woman

Can you track your Twitter tracks?

The biggest questions people who are doing business on Twitter have is how much traffic are they getting from Twitter and what is the ROI? When it comes to marketing, tracking your ROI is always a challenge, unless you are following a simple chain like link – click- sale. But lets face it, most sales are not that simple, because most of us don’t just buy something the first time we see it. We all like to browse and look around, read reviews, and get to know the product or brand. So if you can’t always track link – click – sale then the next step of tracking ROI is tracking the amount of traffic you are pushing to your site.

The great thing about Twitter traffic is that it is qualified. This means that the traffic coming from your Twitter clicks are people who are interested in what you have to offer. They are clicking because they are interested and therefore far more likely to buy what you are selling. Great! So how much Twitter traffic are you generating?

That is an excellent question and until this week, that was not a question easily answered.

Twitter is coming out with their own web analytics. This will let you track your Twitter traffic, see how well your website Twitter integration is working, and see how your website links are being spread across Twitter. The new tool will help give you a much clearer picture of your true Twitter traffic and how well your marketing efforts are working.

Currently the tool is only available to a select few, but it is expected to start rolling out to the rest of us over the next few weeks.

Will this replace tools like bit.ly and google analytics? Not likely. But it will be another tool in the analytics arsenal that will help you get the most from your social marketing.

Tracking Twitter Traffic

Twitter AnalyticsThe biggest question in adult is how can your measure your ROI from Twitter. Traffic is the main answer for that question. But how do you track twitter traffic? Well the short answer is you can’t, or at least not completely. The longer answer is, yes there are tools to use and Twitter just made it a lot easier.

Shortners

The easiest way to track traffic from your Twitter account is to use a shortner. Bit.ly, Goo.gl, Ow.ly are a few of the common link shortners that will also give you analytics. Personally I prefer bit.ly. I like the analytics they give. They let you know where you traffic is coming from and how many unique people are clicking your links. If you are fastidious, you can even check what time of day people were clicking if you look at the past 24 hours. Goo.gl has obvious benefits as far as SEO (though bit.ly is run through google analytics, and also receives SEO benefit), though I am not as fond of their reporting system. Ow.ly is great for those of you who use Hootsuite to manage your Twitter accounts.

When you use a shortened link in your tweets, and someone clicks that link, it is very easy to track it through the analytics of the shortner. However, this does not account for all twitter traffic. You will also get traffic from your profile, from other people tweeting your links and from brand recognition.

Direct Traffic

This is the traffic that is going directly to your website. This could be from the link on your profile, or if you are putting your direct link in your tweets. This could also be from people typing in your URL directly into their browser.

Making it Easier

The bigger problem with tracking twitter traffic is through your analytics. When you are looking at your analytics though a site like Google Analyitics or Statscounter the traffic from Twitter was not always being credited from Twitter depending on the the device being used. For instance if someone when to your site from twitter, but they were using a mobile device, your analytics would likely report that it was coming from a mobile device and not Twitter, even though it was coming from both. Or worse, you would not show a Twitter referal at all, it would show up as direct traffic.

Twitter is now shortening all links that are 20 characters or more with their t.co link shortner. This is meant to help with tracking traffic. It will also allow the analytics providers to properly attribute their traffic sources.

 

Though this newly integrated Twitter shortner is meant to help track twitter traffic, it is in part part of Twitters ongoing efforts to replace the need for third party apps. Though it is unlikely that t.co will replace bit.ly anytime soon. For one, the true analytics of t.co is only available to a small selection of developers and not available to the public. So the only way to view link analytics is through your website analytics provider. For many marketers that is simply not enough.

On the plus side, in your analytics you should be able to see what t.co is directing traffic to your site. This means that you can track your site traffic down to a specific tweet, and that is a huge plus for marketers.

So now we just have to wait for the release of the full t.co analytics to see if they will get rid of the need for third party shortners.

Since the release of the t.co analytics, many webmasters are already reporting sales and traffic coming from twitter from previously unassigned sources.