Comments on: Link Tracking – (lies, damn lies &) Statistics?

By: There’s Peanut Butter In My Chocolate – Social Media Is Polluting Your Web Analytics | The Adaptive Marketer

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:47:05 +0000

[...] are also some other articles on this… Here from Zebu Group… and here from MoreVisibility… That are also really informative on this [...]

By: Andrew Jensen

Andrew Jensen — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:14:38 +0000

Makes perfect sense. I’ve been watching the url shortener stats vs Analytics click thrus and have been suspecting there was more going on than merely java scriptless readers. It’s got to be the link unravelers that are lending toward the bulk of the inflated “visits.”

By: Zebu Blog » Could This Be A Perfect Solution to Measure Your Real Traffic?

Zebu Blog » Could This Be A Perfect Solution to Measure Your Real Traffic? — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:20:50 +0000

[...] The blogosphere is quite excited with the fact that Twitter is directing a lot of traffic to blogs & websites. But no one has been able to conclusively measure that traffic. Fred Wilson, struggled to interpret the data from Google Analytics and measure exactly how much traffic came from Twitter. Meanwhile Danny Sullivian, ran his own experiment by tweeting a short link containing a tracking code and seeing how much bit.ly reported against Google Analytics report and his own server logs. The results seemed quite good but the experiment itself was not yet perfect. Bit.ly’s link counting is inherently flawed as I’ve explained in my previous blog. [...]

By: Jennifer Luec

Jennifer Luec — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:19:55 +0000

I doubt whatever is said by Mr. Sharma above as I tested thoroughly what he had mentioned above and could not find any relevance between his words and the actual working of Bit.ly, twitter and Twitterfox. As per my knowledge though there can be some mismatch between the actual clicks and displayed clicks, but the number of clicks cant increase just by mouse hovering.

By: Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think? « Web design development service

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:21:40 +0000

[...] at the Zebu Blog, Link Tracking – (lies, damn lies &) Statistics? also looks at the issue, questioning whether Bit.ly is overcounting. In a follow up comment, Mayank [...]

By: Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think? | Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing (SEO & SEM) Blog

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:03:37 +0000

[...] at the Zebu Blog, Link Tracking – (lies, damn lies &) Statistics? also looks at the issue, questioning whether Bit.ly is overcounting. In a follow up comment, Mayank [...]

By: Mayank Sharma

Mayank Sharma — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:41:47 +0000

Hi Danny and Joel,
I personally do believe that Twitter is directing a lot of traffic to your websites, but counting just the link lookup is inherently flawed. In fact we did a small experiment just after posting this blog. We created a bit.ly url for this post, and posted it on Twitter. The next instant we saw, that bit.ly’s count was already 4. This only means that some twitter crawler/indexer received the tweet and de-referenced the url mentioned in it. After that I hovered my mouse over the link shown in Twitterfox. Sure enough bit.ly’s count increased by one. We did this repeatedly from multiple desktop’s of several friends and the count just kept on increasing. Not one of these folks during this time had actually clicked on the link.

I would love to know how bit.ly is trying to distinguish between a url lookup and a url click.

ps: Sorry for the delay in comment moderation

By: Joel Mackey (@webaddict)

Joel Mackey (@webaddict) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:52:15 +0000

I have repeatedly tried to educate people on the fact that bit.ly numbers were showing loads in 3rd party applications. Just recently Bit.ly made some big changes and I’m almost positive this isn’t the case anymore. The comparison should be done again now that the service has evolved once more. That click statistics are almost spot on now by 100%. Check it out for yourself.

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:51:26 +0000

I’m awed by the traffic Twitter already drives that I can directly measure using Google Analytics. Twitter drives lots of traffic, if you have a good number of followers or put out a link that goes viral through retweets.

I’m perplexed that link trackers show that even more traffic may be coming. And I can also see from my stats that lots of articles getting many views appear to have been directly navigated to — which is pretty unusual. That, with the gap between bit.ly stats and GA stats suggest indeed that many people really are clicking from Twitter but not being counted.

I think if you check through Bit.ly’s post on link counting, you’ll see they’ve addressed some of the situations like robot clicks that you’ve raised. I doubt they’re perfect, but I think they may be providing a better view of visit to pages that JavaScript-based tracking services do, in terms of Twitter.

By: Sagar

Sagar — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:41:40 +0000

Hey Mayank! This is quite an insightful post. It compelled me to read Dany Sullivan’s post carefully It’d be interesting to see whether the next big thing on the web would be an all new and device/platform agnostic click/referrer analytics mechanism.