Analytics tools undercount Twitter clicks

Those clicks coming into your site from “direct traffic” sources? They may not be coming from where you think they are.

According to research from the founders of awe.sm, a social media analytics company, only about a quarter of links from Twitter actually show up in analytics tools as coming from there. Most of those clicks—about 63 percent—show up as having no referrer.

The disparity comes from techniques awe.sm co-founder Jonathan Strauss called “arcane” in a blog post titled “Twitter drives 4 times as much traffic as you think it does.”