Google Analytics:Failed to add tracking code to a social media website - twitter

I am new to Google Analytics. Basically, I want to track the number of tweets Rbloggers make per day and its incoming traffic. So, I believe I need to track the following website:
https://twitter.com/Rbloggers
However, when I try to add the Google Analytics tracking code to the web source by selecting "Tools > View Source", I found out that I could not add tracking code to the web source. I have no idea why, because I saw people in youtube videos just add the tracking code with ease.
Then, I observed that many video tutorials and websites talk about adding tracking code to "YOUR" website not a public social media website. Does it mean there is no way I can use Google Analytics to track this site, since this is not "MY" website
https://twitter.com/Rbloggers ?

No, there's no way for you to add GA code to a site you don't own (i.e., have access to the server on which the site is hosted). If you want to know how many visits are coming from the links you post, you can look in the Acquisition -> Social -> Overview reports. You can also add campaign codes to the links you tweet - you can find more info here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863?hl=en

Related

Beginner Question: How to access the number of impressions from *other users'* tweets?

I've got a bunch of free online HTML, CSS, and JS tutorials under my belt and I want to try using them to make a browser extension. But I want to make sure that the data I want to use is actually accessible before getting started.
My goal is to make a browser extension for twitter.com that shows the number of impressions of any tweet next to the likes, retweets, and replies. My basic idea is to get the status URL of any given tweet, poll the Twitter API for the number of impressions of that tweet, store that in a variable, and then use CSS to display a little eye icon and the number stored in the impressions variable.
I know that I can find the number of impressions of all of my tweets, both through Twitter Analytics, and also just going to my profile page and clicking the little bar chart icon next to views, retweets, etc. But I'm not clear on whether I can do that for other people's tweets via Twitter's API or anything else. Can you?
For the record, I'm not too concerned about the varying definition of "impression," since it will be consistently applied across all tweets and I'm mostly interested in giving users a comparison between tweets. This is part of a research project to see how this might change how people engage with social media if they know how many views a given post has. If there's a simpler way to go about that using existing platforms, I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks for the advice!
No, impressions data is private. If you are authenticated to the Twitter API then you can use the new Twitter Developer Labs Tweets API to get private metrics like impressions, but you cannot get that for other people's Tweets. Also, the Twitter API does not support CORS, so I don't think you'll be successful trying to use it from a browser extension.

Custom user tracking or 3rd party service for page referral analytics

The question I'm trying to answer for a set of users is how other users end up on their page. There are about 5 different ways a user can end up on your page. For example, they could have searched your name, clicked a link from a newsfeed or received an e-mail with a link to your page.
What is the best way to accomplish tracking these events? I'm initially inclined to create a table to track this. Each link would send an async event to the server to be added to the table. However, I'm also aware that there are many tracking services out there such as Google Analytics and Mixpanel. I've looked at their docs briefly and they don't seem to fit my need.
Am I missing something? Is it worth it to create a "custom" even tracking system to accomplish this?
It is not worth creating your own service. Plus you cannot add async link to search engine result pages or emails (that would require tracking code that you cannot implement in search engines or that would not be executed in mail clients).
Web analytics software tracks traffic sources by analyzing the incoming traffic via its http headers. If there is a referrer set the traffic will be attributed to, well, the referring site, unless the traffic is included in a list of known search engines in which case it will be attributed to organic search traffic etc.
In most systems you can customize source attribution by adding query parameters in the url (obviously this will not work with search engines and the like, since you cannot add parameters to organic search results). For example with Google Analytics you can add custom campaign parameters in email links or advertising campaigns. If people click on those links the parameter value will be send to GA and the source/medium/campaign information will be set accordingly (e.g. traffic from web mail clients would usually be attributed as a referrer, but campaign parameters allow to attribute the link to your mail campaigns).
There might be reasons to create your own system, but channel attribution is not one of them; GA and every other system I know of has this thoroughly covered.

What is a good strategy for staying up-to-date with external API's?

My project is reliant on several API's, like Twitter and Youtube for example. Recently, Youtube deprecated their old API, and it caused issues with my team's iPad app.
We could have stayed ahead of the change if we were paying attention to Youtube's announcements of the upcoming deprecation. But alas, we were not and the idea of staying up to date with all of our dependencies manually(browsing the web) seems exhausting and inefficient.
I have found the following tool to help notify when changes occur with external library dependencies, https://libraries.io. However, this does not help with API dependencies.
Besides checking the API source webpages every so often, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to stay notified and up-to-date with news regarding updates to a specified list of external API's?
After some time looking at different options, I have found a solution that is not perfect, but seems to work best at fitting this need.
Solution Description
This solution uses a combination of Twitter, Google Scripts, and website blogtrottr.com. I am creating a twitter list of reliable dev handles that often post updates on new API. For example I made a list that contained #twitterapi and #YouTubeDev. Used Google Scripts to create an online feed out of the twitter list. Then used blogtrottr to email me every time that feed gets a new posting.
Steps to Implement
Create a twitter list of reliable handles that often post about updates to their API
Create an RSS Feed from that Twitter list. The details for how to do this can be found here.
Plug that url that you get from Google Script into blogtrotter.
I did find some other ways to do this, but so far this is the only solution that was 100% free!

SfGoogleAnalytic Plugin Usage

I have downloaded sfGoogleAnalyticsPlugin to my plgin directory and do all of its settigs.Now i want to implement this to one of my page.How i use it, to view my site analytic result to my page.
I need a code example.
Anybody knows please help.Help is highly appreciated.
companion
sfGoogleAnalyticsPlugin only inserts the javascript code to load GA, it doesn't give you access to analytics results - you need to log into Google Analytics for that. If you've set up your app.yml and filters.yml as explained in the README file, then the code should be automatically inserted into the bottom of every output page, and you don't need to do anything else.
If you want to embed analytics data onto your site (like, how many visitors you have), then sorry, there aren't any existing Symfony plugins that do this. You'll need to use the Google Analytics API, which uses the GData standard (based on Atom). Zend Framework includes classes to make calls to GData services and getting to ZF in Symfony is straightforward.
I had more helpful links, but StackOverflow's restricting me to only two, so sorry!

Getting stats for Twitter app

I'm using Twitter's OAuth for my app (DroidIn)
To my dismay I can't find any way to track who and how often is using the app. Searching Twitter for "sent from DroidIn" does not yield any results. I suppose I can call some sort of counter app from my code but that doesn't seem to be fair to my users. Any ideas or suggestions?
It seems that yet again I have to answer my own question. After some investigation and feedback from question posted on Google Twitter developer group it seems that for now there are no stats easily accessible or available. Said that I found 2 interesting things:
You can search Twitter using source:yourapp switch. For example you can try this query
android source:API
There is very exciting streaming API from Twitter. I have a short write-up in my dev blog.
But if you want some actual stats there's no other choice today but implement it as part of your app. There's one more possibility if you have some sort of web-based interface you may want to use Google Analytics to trigger some Google javascript while submitting the update. I'm trying that right now and may end up with article in the blog

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