Using Google Analytics filters, it’s very easy to create a handy twitter profile which groups together twitter sources such as web clients, mobile clients and short URL services into twitter specific traffic channels. By grouping the twitter traffic sources together it gives better clarity on which twitter channel is converting better. To achieve this level of reporting you’ll need to create a new Google Analytics profile, apply a few simple filters and use an advance segment.

Step 1: Create a new profile ‘Twitter Traffic’

Step 2: Filter one (Grouping different photo sharing services to one source)

Filter Name – Twitter Photo Sharing Traffic
Filter Type – custom filter then advanced
Field A -> Extract A – under campaign source add the leading twitter photo sharing services (for example, I’ve used twitpic|twitxr|mobypicture|visualtwitter)
Field B -> Extract B – none
Output To -> Constructor – campaign source and name it Twitter Photo Sharing Traffic
Field A Required – yes
Field B Required – no
Override Output Field – yes
Case Sensitive – no

Step 3: Filter two (Grouping different twitter mobile clients services to one source)

Filter Name – Twitter Mobile Clients Traffic
Filter Type – custom filter then advanced
Field A -> Extract A – under campaign source add the leading twitter mobile clients services (for example, I’ve used twitterberry|tweetie|twitterfon|twittelator|m\.twitter.com|tweetsville|twitterific)
Field B -> Extract B – none
Output To -> Constructor – campaign source and name it Twitter Mobile Clients Traffic
Field A Required – yes
Field B Required – no
Override Output Field – yes
Case Sensitive – no

Step 4: Filter three (Grouping different twitter web clients services to one source)

Filter Name – Twitter Web Clients Traffic
Filter Type – custom filter then advanced
Field A -> Extract A – under campaign source add leading twitter web clients services (for example, I’ve used twitter|ping|friendfeed|brightkite|hootsuite|twitthat|twitterfon)
Field B -> Extract B – none
Output To -> Constructor – campaign source and name it Twitter Web Clients Traffic
Field A Required – yes
Field B Required – no
Override Output Field – yes
Case Sensitive – no

Step 5: Filter four (Grouping different URL shortening services to one source)

Filter Name – Twitter URL Shortening Traffic
Filter Type – custom filter then advanced
Field A -> Extract A – under campaign source add the leading twitter url services (for example, I’ve used twitturly|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl|Is\.gd|snipr|snipurl|snurl|tiny\.cc|dwarfurl)
Field B -> Extract B – none
Output To -> Constructor – campaign source and name it Twitter URL Shortening Traffic
Field A Required – yes
Field B Required – no
Override Output Field – yes
Case Sensitive – no

Step 6: Filter five (Tagging URL traffic)

Filter Name – Twitter Campaign Traffic
Filter Type – custom filter then advanced
Field A -> Extract A – under campaign name type ‘blog‘ (as an example, depending how you’ve tagged the link using Google URL Builder )
Field B -> Extract B – none
Output To -> Constructor – campaign source and name it Twitter Campaign Traffic
Field A Required – yes
Field B Required – no
Override Output Field – yes
Case Sensitive – no

Step 7: Filter six (optional) – Exclude Other Traffic Sources

Filter Type – custom filter then exclude

Filter field – campaign medium

Filter pattern – I’ve used organic|(none)|banner|cpc

Step 8: Under traffic sources in the new Google Analytics profile, you’ll find the new grouping twitter channels

Step 9: Create an advanced segment under source for filters 1 to 5

Step 10: Done!

Just apply the segments under advanced segments and start understanding better the nature of different twitter traffic channels.

- – - – - – -

Other great resources

Yoast blog twitter analytics

Epikone blog tracking twitter

Getelastic blog e-commerce twitter tools

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.