Twitter has launched a new web analytics tool, helping site owners keep track of Twitter-driven traffic, as the micro-blooging site looks to appeal to the enterprise segment. Separately, the company also announced plans to expand its Promoted Tweets platform.
The new service uses technology gained in Twitter’s acquisition of analytics firm BackType in July.
BackType produced a product called BackTweets, which aided companies in understanding the influence of their 140-character messages, as well as Storm, a data-processing tool BackType called the “Hadoop of realtime processing.”
Using the free analytics tool, companies can examine how their website content is being shared across the Twitter network and view the amount of traffic Twitter sends to their site.
They can also measure the effectiveness of the Tweet Button integration on their websites.
As an example, during the test phase, every Tweet linked to the test subject’s website resulted in 9 clicks, meaning the ‘Tweet to Click’ ratio was 1:9.
Writing in an official Twitter blog post, Christopher Golda, co-founder of BackType, said the offering is “a tool that helps Web site owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites.”
Golda said the Twitter analytics tool will provide Web site owners with three key benefits:
1. The ability to understand how much your Web site content is being shared across the Twitter network
2. See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
3. Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration
The service will roll out this week to a small pilot group of partners and will expand to all Web site owners in the next few weeks.
Golda also pledged to release a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers who want to incorporate Twitter data in their products.
Promoted Tweets
Meanwhile, Twitter is expanding its promoted-tweets program and is now including paid tweets from companies that people don’t already follow in their timelines.
The tweets, which began rolling out yesterday, include promotions for AMC Theatres, American Express, Best Western, Disney, HP, Lexus, Lionsgate, Movietickets.com, Pepsi, Red Bull, Salesforce.com, Sephora, Xbox, and Yahoo.
Twitter started inserting paid tweets into people’s streams in July. The difference with that initial rollout was that people would only see paid tweets from companies they were following. Now they’ll see tweets from whichever company is running a paid program.
“A promoted tweet will appear in a user’s timeline only if the tweet is likely to be interesting and relevant to that user,” according to Twitter’s blog.
“Our platform uses a variety of signals to determine which promoted tweets are relevant to users, including what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a tweet, what they retweet, and more.”
Based on early usage and user response, Twitter says it will roll these targeted, promoted tweets out to a larger audience in the coming months.
