Referral Data Q's
-
1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure.
I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data?
My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through?
2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again?
I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.
-
Hi Tom,
Yes, we ran ads for both Desktop and Mobile. Yes, there was a correlation. lm.facebook.com shows the same numbers as Facebook Network Referrals and they're all Mobile traffic. lm is the redirect for Mobile, I believe.
-
Thank you for the response, Peter. I appreciate the help.
-
So...
1 - there are many Facebooks - desktop, mobile (few versions), 0 (mobile and text only), iOS app, Android app and many other. So why this is important - some of them strip UTM tagging, other pass them and 3rd sent direct traffic. Example - mobile apps sent direct traffic - there isn't referral. From mobile/desktop web - due stripping HTTPS to HTTP referral is also stripping so you get direct traffic. That's why you need to start working little bit with your HTTP web log files and analyses them. There you can find pattern.
Also i heard (but i'm not tested this) that Facebook uses canonical URL of page. So when you make ads Facebook bot come and crawl page content, extracting canonical and later ignore your UTM parameters. As i said - i only heard about this so i can't confirm or deny this. That's why you need to implement "facebook tracking pixel".
That's why some of campaigns there are passed over URL shorteners as - bit.ly, ow.ly or other. Because you can check what's passed to shortener before come to your site. I won't recommend this because one more redirector is killing mobile performance with between 300-600ms (or over!) delay.
2. Yes. Since your site is HTTP this strip referrers from HTTPS. Clicks from desktop apps are direct and there isn't referrer. Also please note that there is new HTML tag about this:
https://moz.com/blog/meta-referrer-tag
and there you can be restricted also what kind of information will be shared with you from browser. -
Regarding Q1) I'm just wondering - did you run these ads on both desktop and mobile? And if so, can you see any correlation between the lm.facebook.com referral and the 'proper social traffic' and the device that they came from?
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
-
What does 'Safari (in-app)' mean in Google Analytics browser traffic?
Hi, can anyone explain what 'Safari (in-app)' refers to in my browser sources? Also, it has a very high bounce rate - any ideas why?
Reporting & Analytics | | b4cab1 -
Submitting an 'HTTPS' sitemap.xml to Bing
I have been trying to submit my sitemap to Bing [via their webmaster tools] for well over a week and it continues to report 'pending' My site is HTTPS and the sitemap is accepted by Google. I questioned Bing about this and got this response: To set your expectations, our Sitemap fetchers use a different pipeline and because of this, we cannot crawl Sitemaps in HTTPS format. We require that you submit an HTTP version of sitemap in order for Bing to properly crawl the file. Please go ahead and delete the current Sitemap and resubmit a new one in HTTP. Currently I don't and can't have a HTTP version of my site & sitemap and my developers are telling me that 3hrs worth of dev time will go into coming up with a work-around which I'm not sure I want to invest in [I have more important things to concentrate my spend on!]. Has anyone been faced with this problem and is there any quick/cheap alternative or do I just accept that Bing won't crawl my site until they update their end?!
Reporting & Analytics | | cityxplora.com0 -
Referral Traffic from Google
Hello, I have a question about my company's new website. I've worked in SEO and studied Google Analytics results for a few years now but have never really come across something like this. I started in this position in January of this year and when I started breaking down the traffic sources in Google Analytics, I noticed most of the traffic was coming from Google.com as a referral source. I had never seen Google.com as a referral source before so I looked into options for what it could be. It was not a paid ad and our organic traffic was coming through in Analytics, Before I could get any further, our new website was launched (we switched CRM's to WordPress) and the referral traffic from google went from 2,966 in January of 2015 to 22 in February 2015. for more comparison, in February of 2014, the referral traffic from Google was 2,496. I expected a drop when we switched CRM's but we correctly re-directed all pages and created a new sitemap and our organic traffic is up since the switch (not enough to cover drop in referral). I thought at first this had to do with our Google sellers account being de-activated when we made the switch, but I quickly fixed this over a month ago and no change. I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen Google.com come through as a referral source in Google Analytics and if they we're able to figure out what it actually was. This would be a great help! Thank you, Alex
Reporting & Analytics | | RASEO1 -
Referral Traffic Issue
I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche. That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link. These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate. The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of. Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?
Reporting & Analytics | | MickEdwards0 -
Google's Not Provided - What can I see and what can't I?
Hi Guys, I've been looking into my company's analytics's data recently to establish where most of our traffic is coming from. More so, I want to get an indication of the percentage of organic traffic that is coming from branded and none branded terms. Not provided takes up 80% of my organic traffic and the vast majority of keywords that are provided all mention the brand name. Does analytics's provide you with all of your branded traffic but just block others that it doesn't want you to see? Or is it just coincidence that the majority of the terms I can see are all branded? I am just trying to establish how strong our brand is and how much traffic the brand name brings against none brand terms. All help is appreciated! Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | Sandicliffe1 -
Ok. I'm just going to cut loose with my stupid question. What is internal link equity? What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity?
What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity? Is there a limit to how many of these I want? What's the rule-of-thumb? Cheers, Wes
Reporting & Analytics | | wrconard0 -
Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
Hi Mozers, I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward. To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month. The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then: CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks REF: http://imgur.com/GwZT8 Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward? Any advice is much appreciated, Thank you!!! abBN3
Reporting & Analytics | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
Haven't seen anything like this
I personally haven't seen anything like this before. I am optimizing my first worldwide page. The rank checker at seomoz and another rankchecker as well says that I achieve rankings in the Us and in the UK as well for my 2-3 word terms. However if I copy a paste a whole sentence from either of my pages (8-10 words) google can not find my site. If I put the terms in quotes than it is ok, but it still cannot find the home page. Not any sentence with or without quotes from the home page, although this page has the most incoming links. Anybody any idea how can it be?
Reporting & Analytics | | sesertin0