Can you trust analytics?
Short answer is no.
I look at analytics from a variety of different sources. Call me distrustful, because that is exactly what I am. Google Analytics is usually considered the best source, but it is not accurate either. Google is sampling (http://growtraffic.com/blog/2015/04/how-accurate-are-traffic-numbers-google-analytics). They test your traffic from a pool and estimate it from there. If you look at your t.co traffic, which is how Twitter is represented in GA, you may be seeing a number that is wildly inaccurate. Why is this? It has more to do than just sampling. It is because Twitter is not passing through the traffic to the t.co tracker if the link is wrapped in a shortener like bit.ly, owl.ly, tiny.url. You are still getting credit for the traffic, it is just tracking as direct and not as t.co.
The easy solution is to just not use a link shortener. Yes and no. Yes because you will start seeing more T.co in your GA. No because we already know that GA is not giving you accurate numbers, plus you will not know what is coming from your Twitter stream and what is coming from the Twitterverse as a whole. If you use the shortner, you will get an accurate count in their analytics. Every click is tracked as a click. So you will know exactly how much traffic you are sending to your sites though your links that you share.
If you are a data geek like me, this might be something you want to pay attention to. It will help you feel better about your actual twitter traffic and understand that GA is not the end all be all of information.
Comments
A bunch of direct traffic in GA isn't really direct traffic and from a number of sources; organic, social, referral, all of them. Why and how this is? Many have speculated on it. Check out this case-study on an experiment on just that. Pretty interesting.
@7veils GA is pretty accurate in my opinion, at least as far as counting the number of visitors is concerned. They also have a realtime statistics feature that I've tested and works great. The blog link you posted says they don't track real time stats.
I do agree with @Webcamstartup though. I know all this "direct traffic" my site gets can't possibly all be TRULY direct.
GA doesn't track t.co when it comes from 3rd party, including their app, embedded feeds on websites, hootsuite etc. The only thing that truly tracks 100% accurately is your server stats. That tracks every hit to your site, including bots. Many people don't have access to server stats. UTM codes increase accuracy but you have to put a different one on every link, otherwise the same IP will only count once. GA tracks an IP address one time as a unique and then will increase the sessions for additional hits. However they have to stay on site for at least 7 seconds. So if someone goes to your site and bounces right away, GA won't show it.