Well, Danny Sullivan has put his finger on something many of us have been wondering about - how come the traffic from Social Media is much less than it ought to be and know it to be?

“….. One leading argument has been that some Twitter applications on mobile devices load pages within the application, rather than using an external browser, and so aren’t getting registered by Google Analytics. Also, some mobile browsers might not process JavaScript. I could see at least four iPhone-based requests like this. But there were plenty of other requests that appear to be from full-fledged desktop-based browsers. Why weren’t they showing up?

One clue is that of the 34 requests, only 5 of them contained “referrer” data, information that some browsers pass on that indicate how they found the page in the first place. For Google Analytics (or ANY analytics program) to properly indicate how much traffic a particular site is driving, it needs as much referrer data as it can get.”

When you add mobile applications  that often can’t load javascript AND add other applications that don’t generate a referral, it makes sense the traffic we think we’re seeing vs. the traffic we actually get, is much lower.

Thinking of my own site, I looked at some of my recent posts that had gotten re-tweeted a lot (see below):

Measurement Mashups from the 2009 Social Marketing Playbook published on July 7th, got 12 re-tweets – what does Google Analytics show?  7 pageviews from Twitter.

Meanwhile “Free” Problems and Social Media Forensics using Radian6 and Blogpulse got 71 re-tweets

Google Analytics only shows 16 visits.

What we don’t know – not everyone clicked on the a bit.ly or tiny url, maybe that’s the difference – but then based on what Danny Sullivan mentioned .. no analytics package is going to measure social media traffic, particularly Twitter traffic, that well.

Hmm .. I wonder what else site analytics doesn’t measure?   Anyway, it’s good to know that Companies Spending Less on Web Analytics Technology, More on Staff according to a post by Andy Beal – you’ll need the extra staff to figure out, among other things, why the traffic we know we’re getting, isn’t showing up.   As more traffic comes from Social Media, it’ll become more important to detect it’s presence accurately.

And since Google is sending less and less traffic to my site, and many others, it’s becoming more important to accurately measure Social Media – but if it’s being uncounted by up to 1500%, we might as well try to figure out what the traffic to a page really is.