Hard to know for sure, but the discrepancy between clicks and referrals is probably because not all of the promoted tweets will be shown on HTTP twitter. DuckDuckGo should know better than anyone that HTTPS to HTTP traffic doesn't leak referrer.
There are two distinct groups of clicks being counted. For clicks to the search engine (from the micro-site) I can use referrer stuff.
For clicks to the micro-site itself, I disregarded referrer stuff (for the reason you said and from previous experience I know Twitter clients often omit them), and looked instead at the requests of the images on the page.
So what would click to the page but not request an image? Either they left immediately (though even then I'd expect the first image to be at least requested) or a lot of people have no images enabled (very unlikely for mainstream Twitter users) or it is some form of click fraud (e.g. bots, miscalculation?) or something else?
I've tried a similar strategy (throwing up a quickie site based on a trending hashtag) in the past by making http://threewordstoliveby.info and http://weedcommandments.com
So far it seems that once the hashtag has stopped trending, the sites don't get much traffic. But I suppose it's possible that a hashtag might trend again in the future so I keep them alive.
One idea I had was making some kind of automated program to grab the trending hashtags, see if a matching domain is available , make a site from the twitter stream, then... profit?
Question is, are there really any true benefits to these microsites that just show the equivalent of a twitter search on a separate page. What would make a user want to click over to it? I kinda understand the point of a site like texts from last night, but I think that has some unique appeal. No?
Here's an update on the click discrepancy issue. Ricky from Crowdbooster (YC S10) notified me about this click policy for promoted tweets.
Promoted Tweets: When a user clicks on the Promoted Tweet to open it in the details pane, or clicks on a link or hashtag within the Tweet copy.
That is, I had a hashtag within the tweet, and so that probably accounted for half the clicks. Now why someone would click on the hashtag when they're already on a hashtag search, I'm not sure -- maybe to refresh the page?
The above is probably the first order effect. Other new theories that are probably second order (but real). 1) Intermediate proxies could be caching the images. 2) Duplicate clicks from the same user.
Is it possible that some of those users clicked on the ad multiple times? If that's the case, their browser would likely cache the images and not reload them.
Although tools like monitter make it easy to sort out streams of tweets - I think your microsite has far better presentation and has the additional movie graphics, etc. I think it adds value to the 'replaceafamousquotewithduck' conversation going on.
After looking at your case study, I took a look at the term stream and I can't see any mention of you in the stream at all.
I realize you were afraid of getting your account banned but I think the way to go is to make a new twitter id, name it DuckQuotes or FamousDuckQuotes or who knows. Then just tweet out messages like you have on the domain right now - every x amount of new quotes tweet a "1011 tweets; this latest one by @MeekaMeyer"
<side note> I met you at PSL one time back when I lived in Philly. Congrats on your success thus far.</side>
Thx for the idea! So that would presumably try to get the link in the stream more -- that's the idea, right? I guess ideally the people would notice the @replies and like them so much they would retweet to double the effect.
That might be true for your site, but for sites I have intimate knowledge of while freelancing in the analytics space, Compete has always been the closest. Except for their search analytics, that is so hilariously bad they should split test not showing it on the site.
