By Morgan Howell
Do you want to track your Twitter traffic? There’s a tool for that. How about your follower count? There’s a tool for that too. How about retweets, @mentions, clicks, sentiment? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Myriad tools have popped up to answer every question a marketer could have and then some. However, there’s one voice we haven’t heard from on this yet, and that’s Twitter itself. But a blogpost last week announced that Twitter is finally taking a stab at an official website analytics platform.
Facebook has had its own analytics platform, Insights, for some time now. Facebook Insights has done its part to both provide meaningful data and to reassure social media cynics. A similar platform directly from Twitter will hopefully do the same thing. Initial reports cite the main purpose of Twitter’s Web Analytics tool will be to track traffic, as driving traffic to a brand’s website is a common Twitter marketing goal. Twitter’s Tweet Button and its new t.co URL shortener generate a wealth of data that has, up until now, been completely neglected.

1. Understand how much your content is being shared on Twitter.
2. See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site.
3. Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration.

It’s a good first step, but still leaves much to be desired. Marketers will be able to track traffic generated from their tweets, but if your marketing strategy focuses on engagement this tool will deliver little value. It will be interesting to see how the platform evolves to incorporate deeper analytics.
What do you think marketers will find most useful about this new tool? What are the biggest gaps in analytics that Twitter needs to address?
Stay tuned for a review of Twitter’s Web Analytics platform when it goes live.