Twitter on Tuesday unveiled a new Web analytics tool that will help Web site owners keep track of Twitter-driven traffic. Separately, the company also announced plans to expand its Promoted Tweets platform.
Twitter now has 100 million users, many of whom are hoping that their tweets will help drive traffic to their Web sites. Until today, however, indepth analytics from the micro-blogging site wasn't available.
Part of the problem is that "Web analytics software hasn't evolved as quickly as online sharing and social signals," Twitter's Christopher Golda wrote in a blog post.
Twitter hopes to rectify that with its new Web analytics platform, which it unveiled today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
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 wrote.
Twitter Web Analytics is possible thanks to the company's June acquisition of BackType, of which Golda is a co-founder. 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."
At the time, Twitter said Golda and BackType's other co-founder, Michael Motano, were among the first to mine Twitter firehose data so that publishers could understand the impact of their tweets.
In his Tuesday blog post, Golda said the Twitter analytics tool will provide Web site owners with three key benefits: the ability to understand how much your Web site content is being shared across the Twitter network; see the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site; and 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.
For those who aren't reaching enough people by tweeting alone, Twitter also has an advertising platform, which it has gradually been rolling out over the last year. On Tuesday, the company announced that it will expand the presence of ads on its site, injecting sponsored tweets into a person's timeline even if they don't follow that brand.
Initially, these tweets will appear for a "single-digit percentage of our global user base," a Twitter spokesman said in an email. "Of this group, we will only show Promoted Tweets to people from advertisers relevant to their interests. We are carefully measuring how users respond to and engage with these Tweets; based on this response, we will roll this capability out to a wider audience in the coming months."
Twitter is working with a select group of advertisers on the effort, including AMC Theatres, American Express, Best Western, Disney, HP, Lexus, Lionsgate, MovieTickets.com, Pepsi, Red Bull, Salesforce.com, Sephora, Xbox, and Yahoo.
Twitter first announced its Promoted Tweets ad platform in April 2010. At the time, it partnered with several specific advertisers, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America. If you happened to search for those brands on Twitter, the top search result would be an ad from those sponsors. At launch, Promoted Tweets were only included in search results, but Twitter said it would eventually expand the program. By June, it added those Promoted Tweets to its trending topics bar.
In October, Twitter officially unveiled its Promoted Accounts program, which added advertisers to Twitter's "Who to Follow" suggestions list. It also announced a "promoted products" option that allowed third-party apps to display promoted tweets and trends. More recently, Twitter said Promoted Tweets would start showing up in the stream of tweets from people you follow.