Although this article on “How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think” is a little more on the advanced side with some technical jargon thrown in, it is interesting nonetheless.

It shows that tracking visitors to your website might be unreliable through several Twitter programs such as Tweetie. Some of these programs open links sent on Twitter through their own browsers, where Javascript is usually not enabled.

Since analytic software such as the very popular Google Analytics uses Javascript to track visitors to your website, visitors from programs such as Tweetie may give Google Analytics as well as other analytics programs the slip. At best these visitors will show up as direct visitors rather than being referred from a specific source and therefore it will be difficult to measure statistics such as Return On Investment (ROI) and conversion tracking.

This is something that needs to be kept in mind when analyzing data, and may explain discrpancies between various analytical software used to monitor the same domain.