Twitter Analytics' Worrying Lack of Competitive Intelligence

With the launch of Twitter Web Analytics imminent, it's worthwhile looking at how best to evaluate analytics to deliver bottom line success in your social media campaigns.

Unfortunately, judging by the screenshot used in Twitter's announcement (above), we may only be in for some pseudo-analytics from Twitter's official product: i.e. metrics which appear to be giving you lots of information but which are actually next to useless in delivering insights and outcomes.

For example, a pull out showing the percentage of Tweets tracked that were generated by your tweet button tells you...almost nothing.

Also, what useful action is generated? Is 10% high or low? We'd only know if we had a comparison relative to sites of similar size. Context that's missing currently.

More importantly, without context or goal measurement, knowing that one Tweet generated more clicks or retweets than another is only so useful: for example what value did those clicks and retweets actually generate in eCommerce sales? Can I pull in goal measurement from my own Web Analytics packages to join the dots?

It appears, at least at the moment, not.

Of course, this is the first iteration subsequent to BackType's solution and we can't expect a fully featured product with extensive competitive intelligence out of the blocks. And competitive intelligence really is where the value could really be added with Twitter's Analytics product.

A good analogy would be Google's Webmaster Tools, which was pretty basic when it launched, but quickly extended its functionality and in recent years has added much more competitive intelligence by bringing in impression share Vs clicks in its keyphrase report: genuine gold dust for analytics fanatics wanting to generate direct clickthough improvements.

Another obvious area that would bring a lot of pleasure to website owners and agencies would be the ability to segment by specific campaigns, integrating tracking tags from your main web analytics software.

This would allow for truly powerful insight to be generated. We could compare the effectiveness of specific campaigns (which may last 2-3 months altogether, involving multiple tweets, promotions and incentives) against other campaigns, during the course of the campaign and once completed.

Archiving these campaigns, with significant event timelines would also be a real bonus for future data mining.

So we can hope for a more effective solution in the coming year from Twitter, but the current tool looks suspiciously like the web packages from the dawn of the internet: all data and no insight. At least: not yet.