Twitter announce Web Analytics tool to help businesses

After a number of different third parties developer and companies have offered their own analytic tools for the site, Twitter themselves have come out and announced that they will be releasing Twitter Web Analytics over the coming weeks.

Announcing it on the TechCrunch Disrupt conference yesterday and on their developers’ blog, BlackType founder Christopher Golda said that the new tool will help website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and how effective it is on their sites.
Main Features
The product’s main draws include the service being free and available for all to use, being able to measure how effective your Tweet buttons are on your site and seeing the amount of traffic that Twitter sends to your site. However, the main draw for businesses and sites will be the software’s ability to show you how much of your content is being shared across Twitter.

This will be the most alluring feature as services such as Google Analytics tell you how many people visit your site but not where they came from. Golda said that the new software was driven by the acquisition of BlackType, who are known for developing social analytic tools.

He said that the software will be released this week to a small group to test out and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. They will also be releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers who are interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products.
Optimism for businesses
So far there’s hasn’t been much revealed about the product apart from the above but there’s enough to suspect that Twitter will have a much easier time winning over businesses and advertisers once they roll out the service.

Golda said in his post that the new software was driven by Twitter’s acquisition of BlackType, who are known for developing social analytic tools and it’s easy to see why they did.

Showing exactly how many are visiting a site and where from, showing what links are popular and what aren’t and who’s tweeting what and when will be invaluable to marketers as they learn to better use the site. Once businesses see exactly what Twitter can do for them, it may convince some of them to invest more time and energy into the service.