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
-
Weird referral data. Spam?
Hi all, a few of my sites are suffering from referral spam. I read a couple of articles here on how to exclude them from your traffic using htaccess but today I was going through some referral stats of the company I work for and I noticed a lot of referral traffic coming from prod2.ssosecure.com I didn't find any article telling me this is spam, so it could also be an intranet of one of our clients where they are sending their employees to our application. Anybody a clue what this could be?
Reporting & Analytics | | jorisbrabants0 -
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 -
Paid Search Referral
I have a brand new site with a paid search referral in my G&A, but we are not running any adwords or any paid marketing for it. The referral is "not set" so I do not know where it is coming from.
Reporting & Analytics | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
What is click2.scour, and why is it showing up as Referral Traffic in Google Analytics?
I've noticed that a couple of my clients in the insurance industry have been receiving a pretty large boost in Referral Traffic from a source called click2.scour.com and click2.efacts.com. What surprises me most is that the traffic has a low Bounce Rate, a high Avg. Visit Duration, and is made up of 100% New Visits. What is this? Why would they be getting so much traffic from these two sources all of a sudden? Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | copyjack0 -
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 -
Traffic Down for Most Referrers - not just Google
Our traffic has taken a severe hit, over the past 3 weeks - down about 60%, which I had assumed was caused by the Penguin update. However on closer inspection of our analytics, our traffic is is down by between 30 and 50% for nearly all our referrers - including Bing and other search engines, referring sites, and even direct traffic! Google provides the vast majority of our traffic, so in terms of the absolute visitor count, the drop in Google traffic has the biggest effect - by some distance. But the fact that traffic is down by similar percentages suggest that Penguin isn't the cause of our troubles at all. We sell garden products in the UK, and it's just coming into peak season. Last year, May was one of our top months, External conditions - such as the very wet weather over the past month, economic gloom and doom - don't begin to explain this sudden and dramatic drop in traffic. We are very perplexed. If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd be interested to hear them. Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | atticus70 -
Dramatic Increase in referrals from own website
The past few weeks I've been wracking my brain to figure out why on earth my branded searches could be dropping off at 30-40%. Well today, I realize I've had a dramatic increase in referrals from my own site (the non www verison). I'm talking 150 in March of last year to 5k in March of this year drastic. My 301 redirects haven't changed as far as I know -- I've had them set to redirect from the non www. to the www. for at least a year or two. I'm assuming visitors from search engines are somehow getting the non www version and the redirect is attributing the traffic to referrals instead of search. The drop in search traffic and the increase in referral traffic fall on the same day. Does that sound right/possible? If so, how do I fix this? My traffic stats for two clients are all screwy because of this. I want to make sure whatever solution I implement won't hurt my search traffic numbers any more 🙂 Has anyone else seen this happen recently? I could imagine an anomaly with one site but I find it odd that it could be two client sites. I still have some others to check. Thanks in advance! Leslie
Reporting & Analytics | | LeslieVS0 -
How to measure number of visits from Google News coming from Google Universal Search (NOT referral coming directly coming from news.google.com) with google analyitcs
I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias0