Twitter Could be Driving 4 Times More Traffic Than You Think

Twitter might be driving 400 percent more traffic to your content site than you believe, despite what your analytics packages are telling you. Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics. Read more here.

These were good packages in the pre-social media world at helping figure out who was driving your traffic.
Today they’re wrong. Terribly wrong, argues venture capitalist Mark Suster.

Since figuring out which channels or sources are referring traffic is a very important part of determining how a brand allocates its marketing, content creation and other budgets, the answers about referring traffic matter.. It is almost certain that Twitter is driving much more of your referrals than you think.

Referrer analysis is based on the outdated metaphor of the web as a network of links between static pages that could only be navigated by browsers, say execs at awe.sm, which creates and sells analytics apps.

Today’s web is built around social streams and other APIs that are consumed by desktop clients, mobile apps, and even other web services, all of which render referrers obsolete as an attribution mechanism.

awe.sm was built for the modern Web, a network of people, not pages, to track the results of Tweets, Likes, emails, and other sharing activities, no matter what path they follow.

The awe.sm app was built to know with certainty where each link was originally shared, in addition to all the places where it was ultimately clicked (referrers). This approach gives us a unique set of data that demonstrates just how misleading referrer information can be.

The referral traffic one sees from Twitter.com is less than 25 percent of the traffic actually driven by Twitter.
"We looked at awe.sm data from the first six months of 2011 spanning links to over 33,000 sites, and the numbers were surprising," the company says.

Some 24 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer. About 63 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all, and would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics.

Some 13 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (Facebook.com or Linkedin.com).

Twitter is the quintessential modern web service. All the ways to consume Twitter, even Twitter.com, are just clients for the Twitter API, so the failure to effectively track it using such an outmoded methodology as referrer analysis should come as little surprise, awe.sm says.

When a user clicks a link in any kind of non-browser client, from Outlook to a desktop AIR app to the countless mobile and tablet apps, no referrer information is passed for that visit and your analytics software basically throws up its hands and puts the visit in the ‘Direct Traffic’ bucket.

The assumptions behind this fallback behavior show just how arcane referrer analysis is. If a visit didn’t come from another webpage (no referrer data), someone must have typed the URL directly into their browser address bar.

If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why the proportion of ‘Direct Traffic’ to your site has been on the rise, the answer is the growing usage of non-browser clients, especially on mobile. And since 66 percent of Twitter consumption is happening in desktop and mobile clients, it’s safe to say that a lot of your ‘Direct Traffic’ is actually coming from Twitter.