Measuring referral traffic is essential for news organizations, or any website owner for that matter. However, there’s always been a major limitation to doing that. Measuring referrals from one of the most popular social networks, Twitter, has proven itself to be a formidable task.

But a long-awaited reprieve is coming. This week, Twitter began rolling out its Web analytics tool. All website owners will have access to the service in a matter of weeks, reports Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman.

The introduction of this tool will provide an official, baseline metric for everyone from news organizations to social media marketers to measure the impact that Twitter has on their websites. Currently, a wide array of often-pricy third-party products like Radian6, bit.ly enterprise and Sprout Social are required to obtain what feels like piecemeal Twitter analytics. Read more

UPDATE 7/25/11, 3:18 p.m. PST : The AP has responded to some of my points. Their statements are below.

If anything, the AP’s decision to start linking to original sources is a hindrance. Because now, in addition to news outlets everywhere reproducing the same exact stories, they will all include unlinked bit.ly URLs.

Trust me, I’m all for hyperlinking. It’s the fabric of the web, what makes the web functional, and I think more newspapers should be doing it — and more often. But what we have here is a technology problem and an ideology problem. I’m sure if the AP could write through stories using HTML (and, of course, have that HTML stripped once it hits the print CMS), they would do it. Or at least I hope they would.  But their solution of including bit.ly links — in parentheticals — isn’t the way to credit newspapers or drive traffic.

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