Technology Development

Most of the web publishers use analytic packages like Google Analytic, Omniture or Core Metrics, to measure what is the source of the traffic. These packages gave good and reliable results in the pre social media world. But today they have become terribly wrong. The allocation of marketing budgets depends hugely on who is referring your traffic. Twitter is driving much more referrals than you think. It is estimated that it is almost 4 times of what we think. Awe.sm is a product by Jonathan Strauss. Awe.sm works by allowing publishers to be able to track every individual share behavior to a very granular level. Such a tracking is not enabled with any other campaign tracking tool.

Awe.sm shows traffic as “direct – bothsid.es / bothsid.es – twitter”. Any other tool will show this as direct only. So, one would assume that one is getting more direct traffic than one is really getting. The fact that Twitter is driving almost 4times more traffic than one thinks. And this fact is true in case for most publishers in terms of understating referrals. This becomes a problem because then publishers don’t invest in Twitter campaigns as much as they do in other campaigns. This is because they do not get the last minute attribution rights. This very often happens in other marketing campaign too. For instance, you see an advertisement in the newspaper or on the television, and then you rush to search about the same on Google. Marketers will assume that Google has driven the traffic. But the fact is that the traffic was driven by your television or newspaper.

Twitter generates a number of social hooks to websites. But the Twitter data including links is pulled by many other websites. So, it is difficult to know that who is referring the traffic. One such example in social media world is LikedIn. Many Tweets these days are being sent to LinkedIn. Publishers assume that the referrals are being generated by LinkedIn. All this is similar to ‘snowball effect’. This is why Jonathan Strauss named the company “Snowball factort”. So it is very important that companies use sophisticated market tracking tools, so that they can know the real source from where referrals will be generated. The story is never as simple as the data reveals. This emphasizes on the need of sophisticated tools. The absence of such tools might cause underinvestment by publishers in some particular site.