Comments on: Are Two-Thirds of Your Twitter Referrals Untracked?

By: brianscoop

brianscoop — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:19:03 +0000

I'm confused. Doesn't "direct" mean specifically NOT a referral – rather that the visitor typed the URL in the browser address window? Are you saying they saw the post mentioned then manually went to brentdpayne.com? If it were an actual referral you could see this in your referrals report, yes?

By: Twitted by yamasas

Twitted by yamasas — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:21:03 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by yamasas – Real-url.org [...]

By: BrentDPayne

BrentDPayne — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:01:30 +0000

Don – Omniture doesn’t count spider traffic in their stats (only server log files catch those). Also a URL shortener (if it 301s, some don’t) would show the originating URL to Omniture.

I’m not sure I follow you on the test though. Could you expand upon that?

By: Don Forrester

Don Forrester — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:43:13 +0000

Whoa, that’s a massive miss ratio. A couple questions arise in my mind…
- How much of that is uncategorized spidering?
- How could we go about verifying this phenomena, and getting better numbers on it?
- What about url shorteners? Could those be used as a clue somehow?

I think there’s two ways to nail this down: the first is by counting noses as far as the twitter apps go, and averaging to the mean; the second way is to get a good sample space of naturally popular twitteres to make the same test you have.

There’s problems with both approaches… but they’re both doable with a bit of work. Why can’t we set up a site with, say, 1000 unique images and see if there’s at least 50-100 heavy twitter hitters up for the idea of passing the urls around to see where their followers are coming from?

I’ve been following your tweets for some time, by the way. Entertaining and informative. Regards, Don (@Parahacker)