What is t.co in my analytics?

Why every click says t.co

X runs its own link service at t.co. Every link posted on X, in posts and in direct messages, is processed and shortened to a t.co address. X gives its reasons in its help centre: shorter links leave room in the post, every wrapped link is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites (with a warning if it matches), and X counts how often each link is clicked as a signal of how interesting a post is.

Because the click goes through t.co, your site sees t.co as the place the visitor came from, not the post.

Why you also see x.com and twitter.com

Some visits can arrive with x.com or the older twitter.com as the referrer instead. Browsers send only the origin of the page by default when you move to another site, never the path, so even then you see the site and not the post. All three mean the same platform. Add them together.

A click that arrives with no referrer at all lands in direct instead; why most of your traffic shows up as direct explains when that happens.

What it hides

Which post it was. Your launch thread, a reply under someone else’s post and a direct message all look the same. So does a link somebody else posted about you, which you may never have seen.

How to see which post it was

Tag your own links before you post them. X shortens the address, but the tags stay part of it and arrive at your site:

https://example.com/?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch-thread

Use a different utm_campaign for the profile link, each thread and each reply that matters. Visits from t.co that carry no tag are then someone else’s post: worth searching X for your domain to find it.

Where it goes in your reports

Tools that know t.co put it under social. Tools that don’t list it as an unknown website under referrals. Read it as X either way.

With Nordva Launch

Launch counts t.co, x.com and twitter.com as social, and the X app on Android too. A UTM tag that names a channel (a medium such as email or social, or a known source) wins over the referrer, and utm_campaign is kept with the visit, so each tagged post shows as its own row; a utm_medium such as cpc or paid makes it paid.