Hey Wiz,
Big thanks for helping share such great information with the community, and being disciplined with your updates and attention to this thread.
I have been promoting clients links to content on a CPC basis with my twitter accts and recently one of my clients spotted 80% differences between our reported clicks on Hasoffers (our click attribution solution) and their Google Analytics reports of pageviews, e.g. Hasoffers reported 5,000 clicks in a day and the client saw 1,000 pageviews in GA. Clients understand that not all clicks result in pageviews, but this discrepancy was too high and we are being pressed by the client for good, concrete answers.
We process the client links by appending our UTM parameters to the content links (manual tagging), then those links are shortened at goo.gl prior to Hasoffers processing.
We then compared analytics on GA pageviews vs Goo.gl clicks vs Hasoffers clicks. Goo.gl measured roughly 1/2 of the Hasoffers links. So, if Hasoffer is showing 1,000 clicks/day -> goo.gl is showing 500 clicks/day -> GA showing 200 pageviews/day.
This is a relevant problem because we get paid on CPC, so we need to agree on what click count is accurate and why GA is not seeing the traffic, if its actually there??
My early research suggests that the twitter mobile app (and various sharing activity) screws up the referrer for GA. So, GA by default calls this referrer on this traffic "direct" - which means my twitter accts are not getting credit in clients GA for its referrals and my client doesn't want to pay for the clicks. Moreover, +80% of all twitter traffic is mobile so this is a big chunk of the traffic.
Has anyone running twitter accts seen this? any, additional insight?
Best,
Shawn