Simple Way to Track Your Twitter Tweets Using Google Analytics

Image via CrunchBase

As micro-blogging is becoming more and more mainstream and business are started to adopt the social media aspect of it to help market services and products, I wanted to share a simple solution for tracking that information using Google Analytics.

Twitter, a leading web application in micro-blogging, allows users to send short, 140 character messages (”Tweets”) to other people that are followers. This is a great way for businesses to share information with their followers. I use Twitter to publicize our upcoming events for SharePoint and Enterprise Project Management along with upcoming classes we are offering. You can Follow Springhouse on Twitter to receive our tweets.

The first step to track the traffic from your tweets is to add Google Analytic tracking code to the page/post URL. I use the following code:

?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

An example of a full URL would look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/page.htm?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

Then I copy the full URL with added code and browse to TinyURL to shorten the URL for my tweet. Past the full URL into the box and TinyURL will create one for you, something like:

http://tinyurl.com/3dF73j

Now you can take the tinyurl and copy/paste it into your tweet and send it out to your followers.

Sit Back and Wait

See that wasn’t too hard to do. Now just sit back and wait a day or so for people to click-thru your tweet. Google Analytics will start to see these hits and begin to track them accordingly.

I use the following format in my tracking code for all of my blog posts/twitter tweets unless there is a special post I need to track separately.

utm_campaign=blogpost

utm_source=twitter

utm_medium=micro-blog

This allows me to drill down in Google Analytics to find the exact number of hits from a tweet.

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