Facebook.com / referral - What is it?

[amichaels]

Hi Moz community!

Coming to you today to ask a two fold question about a mysterious source/medium combination and also social medium data in general.

First question relates to the attached image named 'Facebook Referral.' We've made sure to apply correct tags to all of our campaigns, both organic and paid, and are having a difficult time figuring out where this source/medium comes from which is a bit troubling as it actually has pulled in some revenue over the past couple of months

The second question is around general Facebook data. Our Facebook business manager is vastly over reporting clicks to landing pages. For instance, we saw about 1,700 clicks to site as reported by Facebook business manager, whereas Google Analytics only registered about 950. I know data between the two channels rarely lines up perfectly, but this seems like a rather wide variance.

Can someone help me to understand this, and let me know if there is anyway to reduce the occurrence of one or both of the issues we're facing. Thanks!

referral.PNG

[amichaels]

Ciao Massimiliano!

Thanks for the response here. We have been appending UTM's to our destination URL's, and those seem to account for the vast majority of sessions. However, most of the revenue is attributed to that untrackable source/medium combo.

[amichaels]

Thanks Ira!

I sincerely appreciate your response!

[max.favilli]

What's the attribution rules you set up in FB business manager? google analytics counts only last click as a click, by default facebook counts any click as a click,

if your site is on http and the user is browsing facebook on https (which most likely is) the referrer header is lost on the click, and you will see the visit as coming from direct traffic, you can fix that just adding analytics tracking parameters to the url you publish on facebook

[irapasternack]

Hi Drew,

This article has the best info on the facebook.com/referral question that I've seen - https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Articles/facebook-com-referral-on-Google-Analytics/ba-p/539366.

As for the discrepancy you are seeing between FB and GA, I've seen similar issues at times - hoping someone else will have some insight into that one!

Ira