Twitter analytics are finally coming! This week, Twitter announced that a small pilot group of Twitter partners, including TechCrunch, are currently testing a new Twitter analytics tool that will be released in the very near future. Once released, the Twitter analytics tool will be free to use, and it will track a variety of data such as:

• Number of tweets of any kind across the network
• Number of links to your publisher website
• Number of clicks on those links to your publisher website
• Number of tweets that were sent from Twitter's Tweet button to your publisher website as well as the actual tweets
• Number of tweets from the Tweet button that were sent with an inbound link to your publisher website as well as the actual tweets
• Top links by day, week, and month by tweets
• Top links by day, week, and month by clicks
• Average number of clicks tweets received during specific time periods.
• The percent of tweets that were published using the Tweet button.

You'll be able to retweet content and reply to tweets without leaving your Twitter analytics dashboard, and you can even track multiple website domains and sub-domains. Twitter also plans to launch an API of Twitter analytics, so users can integrate it with their other web and social media analytics tools like Google Analytics.While the Twitter analytics platform is expected to be fairly basic at launch, there is hope that it will grow significantly in the future. In it's initial form, Twitter analytics will help users understand how much of their content is being shared via Twitter, the amount of traffic Twitter sends to a publisher's website, and the effectiveness of the Tweet button on the publisher's site.You can watch the video of the launch announcement by Twitter Director of Web Business Development April Underwood below.What do you think? Do you plan on giving Twitter analytics a try?