Overview
More and more marketers are engaging with their customers through social media
channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz. Fairmont uses Twitter to
increase awareness of offers and drive traffic to sites within their portfolio. To get
the most out of the medium however, it’s essential to do more than simply generate
online buzz. Successfully increasing future conversions depends on Fairmont’s
ability to accurately identify and track website traffic generated by their tweets.
Visits from Twitter’s web interface are reported as referral traffic in Google Analytics,
so if a user clicks on a link to the Fairmont website from a tweet, “twitter.com”
appears in the referring sites report. But a significant proportion of Twitter traffic
doesn’t originate from twitter.com; many Twitter users don’t use the web interface,
instead employing one of the many desktop clients or mobile apps available. In
addition, a link that’s been posted on Twitter might be forwarded via email or
SMS. In all these cases, any traffic which in theory should be attributed to Twitter
activities will be reported as direct or other referral traffic.