Twitter gets more powerful with new analytics tool

techcrunch.com is one of the select partners Twitter has chosen to take part in their analytics beta this week

Twitter has just announced Twitter Web Analytics on their developers blog – a new service that will allow webmasters to accurately measure the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to their websites.

Twitter has already begun to improve how other web analytics software, like Google Analytics or Woopra, record traffic from across the Twitter platform by wrapping nearly all tweeted URLs with their t.co link shortener. Now, Twitter Web Analytics goes further than this by helping “website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites”.

Specifically, Twitter point out three of the product’s main benefits. They are,

Better understand how your content is shared across the Twitter network,

Accurately see how much traffic is sent to your site from Twitter, and

Measure the effectiveness of any Tweet button integration on your site

The Twitter Web Analytics product is powered by BackType, a social analytics company Twitter acquired in July of this year. It is currently in private beta but will be rolled out to all website owners “in a few weeks” as a free service. An API will also be released so developers can incorporate improved Twitter data into their products.