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
-
Payment gateway referrals disappeared
Hi All, I was getting payment gateway referrals for my site for many months but when I have implemented enhanced eCommerce tracking self referral issue resolved but I haven't read anywhere about this solution so I just want to confirm once . Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
Internal Referral Traffic Issue due to https/http?
Hi Mozzers, we´re running a secured https account section on our website including a messaging center where lots of non secured own URLs are being shared among the users. Is there a possibility that a user clicking on one of the shared URLs within the https section triggering another session thats been counted as direct traffic? Thanks for your help! Greets
Reporting & Analytics | | LocalIM
Manson0 -
Stripping Out Referral Spam From Past Reports
Hi, I'm looking to confirm the best approach for retroactively stripping away referral spam (free buttons, SEMalt, etc.). Now to be clear, I already have filters in place to ignore them from current stats, so moving forward I'm fine. However, I'd love to go back and check untainted stats. I've setup segments using a regex to strip the root words away and it seems to be working. I have a regex setup to strip out things like: social-buttons|seoanalyses|copyrightclaims|classifiedads|jobsense|free-share-buttons|e-buyeasy|acrobats.hol|cheap-online|amezon|search-help|qut-smoking and so forth. I've been going through my referral data, noticing obvious spam, and adding their domains to my segment. Is this the optimal way for me to get a clear, untainted view of my past stats?
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Google Images referral visits fell off a cliff
As of 28-Jan, referral traffic from Google images (/imgres) to my domain has pretty much vaporized. Visits are down 85%. It's actually not a disaster because most of those visits were from poorly optimized alt tags that were resulting in low quality visits. The interesting thing is that visit duration is up 80% during the same period. So I'm asking this question out of curiosity more than anything. Is this likely an algorithm tweak? I can't think of any major changes on my end. There's only one other data point to mention but I don't see how they'd be connected. I did two PRWEB releases on 29-Jan and 30-Jan that resulted in a few hundred new no-follow links back to my site. 22b7k2.png
Reporting & Analytics | | JonDiPietro0 -
Subdomain referral
Hi, We have two sites mysite.com and aa.mysite.com. We want to track these sites separately. We created two different properties with IDs UA-XXX-1 for main domain UA-XXX-2 for subdomain. gaq code for main domain is as following, gaq code for subdomain is as following, It works well for subdomain. But we want to see traffic from subdomain to main domain as referral.
Reporting & Analytics | | OkanKortan
What is wrong with the gaq code of main domain?
Do i need to change code or is it enough to inactivate subdomain tracking option in profile settings of main domain? Thanks in advance,0 -
The client's website serves as the main referral?
Hi mozzers, I have this weird case where one of my client's first referral is its own website!! I am really confused especially that I have checked there www vs non www and the non www is redirected to the www. This means that it resolve to one version which is good! Any thoughts on why the main referral is its own site? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Facebook.com/I.php
Hi, I get a lot of traffic lately from Facebook.com/I.php. This is was Google Analytics shows me. But I can not see more details concerning what causes of the traffic. Since it´s more than 500 Users per Day I need to see more details. Does somebody has an idea on how to do a more detailed analysis of this traffic? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RTG0 -
Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?
Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0