- see which features their customers most often complain about
- automatically detect people having issues with their product, that are being ignored
- detect unethical (or illegal) behavior by competitors
If you don't want to go through the registration process (there's a 14-day free trial), we've got lots of product screenshots and scenarios posted on Twitter: http://twitter.com/iTrendHQ
Would love your feedback on the website, features, pricing.
As "web stats" - sure. GA is a great alternative to parsing your own server logs, which doesn't make sense to SMB.
But ROI? GA will tell you absolutely nothing about why nobody cares about your product or service, or why your competitor X is succeeding while you are not.
You will get what you pay for, simple click statistics, but don't expect any business insights on ROI.
Problem is (not really a problem, but a fact of life) most of today's interactions that are pertinent to your product's success (and the ROI) are taking place outside of your properties that are trackable by GA (e.g. website).
If you look at apps like Meerkat, their meteoric rise can be attributed almost entirely to a handful of influential VC/celebrity figures, who loved the app, started using it, and actively promoting it. Product Hunt may have played a role in the beginning (those referrers would show up in GA of course).
GA is great at tweaking your conversion rates through the funnel, but as far as magic is concerned (what makes something explode), GA is helpless.
Founder here, happy to answer any questions you might have. This is the tool I used to discover a massive twitter spam issue in a bot-related discussion a couple of wks ago.
We built a product for researching competition. Part of its core functionality is monitoring Twitter activity related to a given company and determining where their popularity is coming from, and who is influencing it.
Naturally, we’re testing the product by monitoring other companies in the Competitive Intelligence space, so we know what we’re up against. The list of companies we added was determined by questions we’d been asked by prospects, “how does iTrend compare against X in terms of Competitive Intelligence?”.
One company, Owler, immediately stood out due to some very unusual patterns. All of their top promoters appear to be their own accounts. Each account is going through companies' Twitter handles alphabetically, sending them a message based on what appears to be a series of predetermined templates.
Details with screenshots, if anyone is interested:
So, would you all like to see an example of some really sophisticated ongoing twitter spam, that normally stays undetected?
On the one hand, it's our competitor (so I understand my motives could be questioned). On the other hand, I feel companies that employ these practices (and VC firms that support them) should be called out.
if anyone from Twitter is reading this, connect with me regarding the problems we uncovered, I have practical suggestions on how to make your service better.
I once wrote to him asking if he was a bot, got an immediate reply back saying No.
Point I was trying to make - even thousands of messages per day can be explained and justified, and if you follow someone like that, it's up to you to filter the noise.
Almost every online marketer does this type of automation. As you said, they goal is to get real people to look at their account, and to hopefully follow them.
This is mild, comparing to some of the other activity that goes on.
Personally, I agree with you, Twitter is very much like an economy... currently, some much of the Supply (publishing) is being manufactured, it's exceeding Demand, so now the Demand (real human readership) has to be manufactured with more bots... Vicious cycle. All this results in a bad experience for the average user. Twitter is a fantastic platform, it just has certain qualities that are now becoming more of a problem than before.
As for immediate automatic termination for thousands of messages per day - that's a gray area, because Automation (IFTTT etc).
There are also people making living off Twitter, some of the top "influencers" or "internet marketers" post hundreds times a day. You look at someone like Marc Andreessen (I can't see @pmarca, he blocked me on Twitter:)), his total tweet count is approaching 50,000 - some may argue even this isn't possible for a typical person with a job. He pulls it off though.
Going back to the topic of bots: thousands of messages per day is extreme, and that's not what most smart bots do. The biggest effect is resulting from ones that have learned to live and act well within Twitter guidelines, which doesn't just make them harder to detect, it makes them harder to ban.
Here's a random account, it posts a million times a year, or 2,700 times per day:
Some are (or virtually indistinguishable from) real people, typically in Asia, performing simple tasks a la Mechanical Turk.
The bigger networks though appear to be completely automated, and what's really important is that they they don't look "fake" in a sense that they look, and act, like a typical user.
Spam is a grey area, since automation is so wide-spread now. Should be noted that some of the top marketers on Twitter are very prolific. Guy Kawasaki has posted 138,000 tweets since 2007 - that's more than 60 tweets a day, every day. Don't mean to pick on him, there are hundreds like him. I've seen accounts posting thousands of messages a day. Simple act of promoting something very actively from the same address isn't enough, it's done by legitimate marketers all the time.
Keep in mind there are different sources of ad revenue, and there are multiple parties involved. Twitter will count an ad impression when the message is viewed "above the fold", for example your iPhone Twitter app displays the promoted message in the active portion of the screen, which implies you can "see" it. I believe that bots do not have a significant effect on this particular type of revenue. However, many commercial deals involve a different definition of 'impressions':
Number of tweets promoting the product x number of followers the promoting accounts have
... and that's where bots play a huge role.
So, this is getting too big for posting here, if anyone is interested in this, I can blog. This topic is surprisingly complex.
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