Twitter has unveiled a new analytics tool, Twitter Web Analytics, designed to help publishers understand how much traffic the service is driving to their sites. The tool is based on the technology Twitter acquired when it bought BackType last July.
Twitter Web Analytics was announcecd at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday, in a demo by Director of Business Development April Underwood. The tool will be available for free and is currently in private beta. A small group of partners will have access to it this week; Twitter plans to roll it out to all website owners “as soon as we can.” The company also plans to release an API for developers, acknowledging that many 3rd-party tools are far more sophisticated in the insights they provide.
Below are some key screen shots from the demo, which will help you understand what information the tool will provide.
1. Traffic sent by Twitter
In the seven days before the demo, TechCrunch.com received more than 500,000 clicks from 96,000 tweets that contained links back to their site. That’s an average of 5.4 clicks for every tweet. During this period 10% of users
2. Tweets
The second screen shows web site owners the actual tweets themselves, and will allow them to interact directly with the tweets (ReTweet, reply, etc.) from inside the dashboard. Underwood mentions that they’re “using some of their own web tools that they’re building for web sites” to make this possible — it’ll be interesting to see what kinds of additional tools Twitter will be rolling out.
3. Tweet Button
The third screen shows you the same information — tweets per day and the actual tweets — but only for posts created by the Tweet Button. The goal is to help web site owners understand how to optimize the placement of the Tweet Button on their site.
4. Content Leaderboard
This screen shows you which content is being shared the most, and which is being clicked the most.
You can see the entire demo here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17250339/highlight/201149.
What are your thoughts? Too little, too late? Or just what we needed?
And how will these traffic-related analytics fit into Twitter’s business model?
