Facebook referral
-
Olympic athletes in track & field and BMX use our product in their training. When they discuss how they use our product on Facebook, we get a boost in traffic. However, all I see in programs like Woopra is facebook.com in the URL, but not the actual page. How do I determine which FB post with a link to our site is causing the increase in traffic?
Best,
Christopher -
Thanks, that's good to know. Just wanted to confirm I was not missing something.
Best,
Christopher -
Correct Facebook doesnt allow us or anyone to see that shared data. Also they took away from google the ability to use share data etc
-
Thanks, that's another useful tool, but it does not address the links to which I'm referring.
If someone posts a link to my site (they don't use any FB tools, just a raw URL) I don't know of any way to track that. I see the hits on my site via GA and other tools, but all I know is the link came from facebook.com and that's all. I don't know of any way to see who posted a link to my site on FB. It would seem to me that many SEOs would want to know this. I'm surprised this has not been discussed before on SEOmoz. Unless I'm missing something, this seems like a huge hole in data collection, given that FB is so pervasive and links from FB are so common.
Best,
Christopher -
You can see which url got shared - go to this page https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/activity/
add your domain then change height to 4400
or you can see landing pages in analytics - but your correct that you cant see who did it
-
Thanks, the URL Builder will come in handy for my posts. When other people post FB links to my site, apparently there is no way to track that.
Does FB or a third party offer an app to track the source of these links? Given the shear scope of FB, this seems like a huge oversight. I can't believe someone has not solved this.
Best,
Christopher -
Your best way is to tag your links in your status posts with a special tag- you can use the url builder here http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867
Then you can see which post got you the clicks in GA
-
Sorry my tool socialmention.com not working its showing no data. But I have typed below query in Google.com
site:facebook.com "bmx Caroline Buchanan"
And I get this URL: http://www.facebook.com/CBuchanan68 where they have mentioned about you but dates are not matching.
-
The back-link is not available in Woorpa either. I'm guessing FB obfuscates the link.
-
To be honest Google is not that smart at the moment that it will provide you the exact URL of from which post the traffic is coming from!
-
PS: On an parallel topic, a large and growing percentage of my organic searches are encrypted. So, I don't know a large fraction of the search terms people are using to get to my site, and due to this FB issue, I don't know a large fraction of the back links people are using to get to my site. It's like I'm going backwards at an accelerating pace.
Best,
Christopher -
It was Olympic BMX Caroline Buchanan on November 13. But that is working backwards. Suppose I got a hit from FB and did not know why. What then? Given that Social Media is such a huge part of SEO, I'm surprised this data is not available, but apparently not.
Best,
Christopher -
Google don't have that much control on facebook data. May I know the date and product name which athlete has mentioned in post ? I know some of the tools by which I can find that post ?
-
Thanks for the quick response. I'm a GA novice, so maybe it's there and I don't see it, but all I see under Traffic Sources>Sources>Referrals is m.facebook.com for the source and l.php for the referral. I'm pretty sure I know where the traffic came from due to the date that an Olympic athlete posted, but how would I find that post using GA if I had not know the athlete? Does FB intentionally hide this information?
Best,
Christopher -
Hi Christopher,
Do you have analytic access ? In Analytic go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals >
You will get all referring sites in that click on facebook.com, You will get exact facebook pages where you are getting traffic.
Note: They might also be running paid campaign in facebook.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Combine Facebook referrals into one
Hello, I am a bit confused about the correct setting of filter to combine All facebook referrals into one.
Reporting & Analytics | | Johnroger
After going through different versions, not sure which one is correct and will work Some versions say that Search string should be - *^.facebook.com$ and Replace string should be - facebook.com While according to other Search string should be > *.facebook
and Replace string should be - facebook Please guide which one of this is correct and will work ? Thanks0 -
Amazon referral on analytics
In the past month, I've received referrals from tt.amazon.com, coming from both Ireland and Germany - it made me a bit suspicious as I haven't seen tt.amazon before and I can't find much online about it. I'm a little reluctant to click through to the website in case it is suspicious... Does anyone know anything about this and should I be concerned? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RayflexGroup0 -
How to stop Spam Referral Traffic?
We get referral traffic from Spammers to our Wordpress sites. That traffic comes from different countries: Russia, Ukraine, India, Germany, Pakistan etc. What's the best way to get rid of it? Setting up filters in Google Analytics? Is there something else that I need to do? Is there a plug-in that could help? Does that traffic have a negative impact on my SEO? Does it affect the rankings?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO2 -
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
I've seen 4webmasters.org/default.apsx as a referrer, but now it's showing as top page visited
I've seen 4webmasters.org/default.apsx as a referrer, but now it's showing as top page visited. How is this happening and how do I fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Stamats0 -
Loss of referral traffic after change of CMS, host
I have a client that changed from MoveableType to Wordpress. He also changed from a dedicated server to WP Engine. He may have blocked search engines for a week or two, so his organic traffic is down but only by 25%. He's 301 redirecting all of the old pages. The mystery is that his referral traffic from Google is down 90%. It's a popular blog, so that's thousands. It's been going on a month now. Anyone seen this before?
Reporting & Analytics | | Hyper-Dog0 -
Google Analytics - Referral Traffic Question
How Google Analytics determine that some particular web site referred traffic if there is no back link on that site?
Reporting & Analytics | | DiamondJewelryEmpire1 -
Deciphering Facebook backlinks
I monitor our web traffic in real time using Woopra. I often make on-the-fly decisions about which AliveChat window to activate based on the backlink. The FB backlinks are encoded with something like http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.mydomain.com/&h=PAQFRib7D Is it possible to see which FB page that link originated? Best,
Reporting & Analytics | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0