Twitter and Facebook are our fastest growing sources of traffic. We have the Tweetmeme button and the big Facebook button, but both of them kinda suck when it comes to tracking. Tweetmeme is stripping our Google Analytics UTM code, and Facebook’s button appears to hate it when we try to pass a UTM suffix on the URL. What gives? Add this to the fact that Twitter URL shorteners inconsistently skew our tracking and apps like TweetDeck and Twhirl show up as ‘direct’ traffic … we’re f’d. Or are we?
All business decisions are made with incomplete information. We know we don’t have perfect tracking (because no web analytics tracking is perfect). We know we have significantly-less-than-perfect tracking when it comes to Facebook and Twitter traffic, but we still can see it as the fastest growing source of traffic. What else do we need to know to know that we should continue to reach out to users to grow our Twitter followers and Facebook fans? Nothing — integrating into existing social networks is the best strategy for success.
I think we’re going to stop using tagged URLs for this. We’ll rely on Google’s referring domain report which will make things more accurate, more consolidated, and more simple.
Twitter And Facebook Analytics Are Driving Me Nuts
Twitter and Facebook are our fastest growing sources of traffic. We have the Tweetmeme button and the big Facebook button, but both of them kinda suck when it comes to tracking. Tweetmeme is stripping our Google Analytics UTM code, and Facebook’s button appears to hate it when we try to pass a UTM suffix on the URL. What gives? Add this to the fact that Twitter URL shorteners inconsistently skew our tracking and apps like TweetDeck and Twhirl show up as ‘direct’ traffic … we’re f’d. Or are we?
All business decisions are made with incomplete information. We know we don’t have perfect tracking (because no web analytics tracking is perfect). We know we have significantly-less-than-perfect tracking when it comes to Facebook and Twitter traffic, but we still can see it as the fastest growing source of traffic. What else do we need to know to know that we should continue to reach out to users to grow our Twitter followers and Facebook fans? Nothing — integrating into existing social networks is the best strategy for success.
I think we’re going to stop using tagged URLs for this. We’ll rely on Google’s referring domain report which will make things more accurate, more consolidated, and more simple.