How Tweets by Traffic works
When a user clicks on a link in a tweet, a referrer is set of the form t.co/abcxyz, where t.co tells Chartbeat that the user came from Twitter, and abcxyz is a unique ID telling Chartbeat which tweet a user came from. By looking at this ID, we are able to aggregate traffic at the tweet level.
What has changed
Recent browser changes by some browsers, including Chrome and Safari, have caused traffic from Twitter to publisher sites to come through to your Tweets by Traffic module with the referrer set only to t.co/, eliminating the unique ID. This has the effect of obscuring the specific tweet a user clicked on for users in those browsers.
Over the last few months, we have seen the rate of users without unique IDs spike. As of Oct 29 2020, it was at about 80%. This means Tweets by Traffic are significantly lower than expected, because they only reflect a subset of the actual traffic being driven by tweets. Over time, we expect these numbers will only become less accurate.
Unfortunately, because this change is caused by browser changes, Chartbeat and Twitter have little power to affect it. Given that, starting February 16, 2021, Chartbeat will no longer support Tweets by Traffic in the Real-Time Dashboard.
How can I continue to understand my Twitter audience?
We understand this change may be inconvenient for your team, and want to make sure your team can still effectively monitor Twitter traffic — overall Twitter referred traffic numbers, Twitter badges, and all-up Social traffic stats will remain unchanged in our Real-Time and Historical tools. We advise customers to monitor the relative popularity of their tweets to directionally get a sense of top tweets driving traffic to your website(s).
Thank you for being a Chartbeat partner. We’re committed to providing you with best-in-class editorial analytics.