The day has come.
Nearly three weeks after Twitter promised it would unveil an analytics tool to accompany its “t.co” link-shortening wrapper for all links posted on the website, the company unveiled a preview version of the all-new product at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
The product is beta-tested with select partners this week and will be fully public in “a few weeks,” according to the company.
Twitter described the new Twitter Analytics on its developer’s blog as “a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites.”
The tool, demoed at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, appears beautifully basic, perhaps even more basic than simplicity-focused competitor Google Analytics. As Twitter added:
“The product provides three key benefits:
- Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
- See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
- Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration
“Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July,” wrote BackType founder Christopher Goulda in the Twitter developer’s post.
At the time, Twitter was enormously excited to announce the acquisition of the small, real-time social analytics startup BackType and the technology behind its signature tweets-tracking product BackTweets, which had been employed by such diverse top tier companies as Microsoft, TIME magazine and interactive agency Razorfish.
As Twitter platform head Ryan Server exclaimed to All Things D: “BackType’s two founders, Christopher Golda and Michael Montano, were among the first to mine Twitter firehose data to help some of the world’s biggest publishers understand the impact of their Tweets. The BackType team will bring this technology and expertise to Twitter to help Web publishers get the most of out of the platform.”
Well, it sure seems like that played out totally according to plan. At the same time, the new Twitter analytics tool is likely to pose a threat to third-party analytics companies that have so far filled the gap, including the popular Bitly, best known for its own link-shortening tool.
Just last week, Bitly showed off the power and potential of its own home-brewed analytics service in a blog post that demonstrated the “half-life” of the average link shared online through all forms of social media, not just Twitter.
We’ve reached out to Bitly for comment and will update when we receive their response.
