all.
I want to add utm_ parameters to all my social share buttons. I successfully included the parameters into the Twitter and G+ without any problems. But have a lot of problems with Facebook and Pinterest.
Pinterest strip any utm_ parameters.
Facebook uses a canonical URL instead of I provided.
Solutions I was tried:
1) using an URL shortener bit.ly. Pinterest doesn't allow to use it. Facebook still use the canonical URL instead of one I provided
2) Use the fb_ref for the Facebook. We use Wordpress VIP hosting and this hosting strips any parameters from facebook.
3) Rename the utm_ parameters to utm. It was fixed the problem but I want to keep all my tracking info consistent.
Any ideas? Thanks
UPDATE 12/21/13
I want to have the following. Scenario:
1) user shares the content from my site (http://example.com/url/?utm_campaign=onsitesharebutton)
2) user's friend goes to Social Network, for example Pinterest, and see this Pin
3) user's friend clicks on this Pin and goes to my site. When he goes to my site, I wanted to have the utm_* parameters in the URL, ie http://example.com/url/?utm_campaign=onsitesharebutton. In this way I will know that this user arrived through a certain source or overall marketing channel as part of a certain campaign
Problems:
1) Pinterest strips UTM_* parameters from the my URLs
2) Facebook uses canonical URL to share and ignores my UTM_* parameters
I still would like to change a few things about the Facebook Like / Share button and Google+ button seems to sometimes have issues in Safari, but I successfully track likes, pins, +1s, tweets, and even LinkedIn using a variety of techniques.
Facebooks recent changes to their buttons just confused me. I had everything working and then they change all.js or whatever the JavaScript is you must use. They also changed the colors and size. I wasted a lot of time on this and I'm still not happy but I do track everything carefully in Google Analytics.
Related
During checking traffic source on e-commerce website i get confused.
I know that param gclid=.. means that user is tagged by GoogleAds, while fbclid works the same way but with facebook.
However, I dont understand what does it mean while they are both together in single url, like:
www.example.com?gclid=CjwKCAiAyrXiBRAjEiwATI95mafT26kwak0CFBgICH0ZlLqafSBuyyoUBVZihf22pPdG9QK8DUmiZBoCh8YQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds&fbclid=IwAR0oihEZbw0Q43GXiv4YW9n_G9odTEcpxzLtMxjYYqgrTt5EM-BcKqrJyuU
Is it possible that google ads is displaying ads on facebook and that is why gclid and fbclid are attached to url at the same time?
I have asked the same question on support google and get reply from them.
This case happens when a link including gclid is pasted on a Facebook
page and somebody clicks on the link.
Source to answer.
Actually it's quite possible and normal.
If user searches on web via Google, clicks on Ad and is redirected to page, for example https://example.com/index?gclid=randomstring then it displays at the top of their browser.
Now user can copy this link and share it via Messenger (more common case) or facebook to someone. Then Facebook will not remove gclid and append fbclid.
As a result, you get a link with both these parameters.
I have an email that get sent out to users, which needs to have a share to facebook or twitter button.
I know there are URL's which can open the share dialogs etc, but the problem is i need to track the number of shares for the item being shared (just a count).
I know there are things like the Twitter Count API, but it's unofficial, private and not supposed to be used, so i don't want to use that and then have it turned off and left with no data to work with.
The only thing i can think of, is have the email link to my website, which contains JS which opens up the Twitter/Facebook dialog, posts it then in the callback tracks the information back to my server.
Any other ideas?
You can set the link to an 'essentially' blank webpage, and use a typical Google Analytics tracking parameter on the link to record the count. Then, create an auto redirect form on the 'blank' webpage so when people click the link, it goes to the page, which then automatically redirects to the share link.
It's a roundabout way of achieving what you want but is one way..
I am looking for Like Button to be shown in my ios native app, users of that app have already connected to app via facebook account.
there are several questions related to Facebook Like Button on stackoverflow but those are not specific to authorized single facebook page of the app.
According to official doc of facebook, facebook pages can not be liked via built-in action o open graph api.
But want only one official facebook page of that app to be liked by user when he hits like button. i don't want user to navigate away from the app or login again in web view to like facebook page.
is it possible to like app's facebook page without promoting user to log in again in webveiw?
Edit
Findings
1. https://stackoverflow.com/a/5837036/1632984
2. Comment by wallacer
"the general consensus does seem to be that you can't like a page on behalf of the user, however I just had an ios game like a page on my behalf. Extreme Road Trip successfully manages to get you to like their own page. I wish I'd paid more attention when I did it now..." – wallacer
This still can't be done directly using the graph api ( to the best of my knowledge ). What you can do is open a webview to the page you want the user to like. If you're rewarding their liking your app or something, when they close the webview (you'll have to provide a close button), you can use the graph api to check whether they like your app page. As far as I can tell this is the best current solution - and seems to be the approach taken by mobile games.
That said, I haven't used Facebook SDK 3 yet, so there may be something in there that could help you.
It appears that Liking a page on behalf of a user is still impossible. I've glanced over the iOS SDK Reference, and it doesn't seem like there is a built in mechanism to like anything.
However, in reading one of the other posts you linked to, and remembering that Facebook opened up the Like open graph action so app developers could allow their users to like content generated by their application...I found this link about built-in-actions (likes).
According to that link, you can post Like actions to your users by POSTing to https://graph.facebook.com/<user_id>/og.likes with the POST params for object (the open graph object URL you want to like on behalf of the user in this case your page's url. eg. www.facebook.com/yourpage) and access_token (obviously, for your user).
I'm not totally convinced that will work; though it is conceivable. My second thought would be to create an Open Graph Object for your page, and have all your users like that. Though, that is a little less ideal, as it removes the possibility of people finding your Page while they're on Facebook and would require you to put a lot more effort into getting likes for the Page via your website, application, etc.
I hope that helps a bit, good luck.
In my Google Analytics reports I get "facebook.com / referral" as the source. Is it possible to get the exact URL?
I don't think it's possible. as #yahelc pointed on a previous comment most traffic from facebook goes through a facebook controlled redirect on page facebook.com/l.php .So if you want to have campaigns on facebook you can use urls with campaign query parameters to keep track of it.
eg: link to
http://www.example.com/?utm_campaign=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com
Now they will show up in GA as a separate campaign and you can tell how many visitors come from that specific link. You probably want to minify that link using bit.ly or goo.gl.
Create multiple campaigns on facebook and change the utm_campaign parameter as much as you want. You can also create different utm_content parameter to separate your marketing efforts on facebook. Keep the utm_medium and utm_source as static as on the example above.
This is how social marketing analytics measures marketing efforts on social networks. Anything that comes from facebook is not tagged you know comes from people posting links to your site other than you.
At the same time it really makes no sense to have the referral url at all. If you think about it most of the times it will be from private posts that you don't even have access to see, even if you had a url for it. That's just not the way facebook works. It doesn't have pages, it has streams and posts.
More about url tagging:
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033863
The answer is yes and no. You can drill down to referral path for facebook source in the report Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Refferals by simply pressing facebook.com at the Source coloumn, just like for all other visits from the referring site.
But that would be not much of a use, because for facebook you'll always see /l.php. And that's how facebook works, it doesn't allow visitors to visit the link immedeately, instead it redirects user to the page with url facebook.com/l.php?u=<link-to-your-site.com> with a redirect or maybe with some text like "if you're sure you want to leave", so technically, the referring page would be this /l.php that GA shows.
So if you need to track the efficency of your Facebook activities - use utm tags, like #Eduardo Cereto mentioned. Here's a very nice video tutorial on link tagging for GA: http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/v5/campaigntracking_adwordsintegration-v23_ia5/ (starts from p. 17, you can skip all that goes before).
Hope it helps!
i just know this settings here:
http://www.sebastienpage.com/2009/05/06/google-analytics-trick-see-the-full-referring-url/
I'm trying to get a user to 'Like' a page via the SDK. User is signed in and I get a valid access tokken form the cookie. My APP has asked for permissions read_stream and publish_stream. I can successfully do things like post to their wall, etc. But when my APP tries to 'Like' a page, I get the error back:
OAuthException: (#3) Application does not have the capability to make this API call.
Am I missing some other permission, or is there a setting I have to turn on in my APP? I'm at a loss here.
You can't like a Page on behalf of a user (Bugzilla discussion). You can, however, like posts, comments, and photos on behalf of a user.
Edit 7/9/2012
Since bugzilla no long exists, the bug linked above is inaccessible. Google doesn't have a cached version of the page, so I ran another search. The best thing I could come up with was this Google Code Discussion regarding the ActionScript API.
Facebook makes brief mention of Publishing likes via the Graph API in the documentation, but doesn't say one way or another whether you can like a Page on behalf of a user - just "Objects" which (probably arguably) are not "objects" in Facebook-lingo.
My thought is, the API to like page is available, but is only offered to white listed applications (such as, the Facebook iOS and Android applications) written by "special" publishers. There's obvious reasons why Facebook wouldn't want/allow developers to create like connections on the graph. It would be taken advantage of by spammers and other nefarious developers and would deteriorate the meaning of what a "like" represents for a page on Facebook.
My guess is, you'd have to make a pretty strong case to Facebook about why you need/want access to the Page's Like connection (for publishing) before they'd even consider giving you access. I'd also guess that they'd want to verify that you're doing only user initiated like creations (in such a way that the iOS application would handle it) so as to protect the reptutation/meaning of a "like" action.
Actually this is NOT true, but you have to do a complicated Javascript / UIWebView process in order to display a Facebook 'page' of JUST the like button on your view, and this like button you can configure in the JavaScript / Objective-C (using string replacement) to be any Facebook page url you like.
Facebook's platform policies don't allow for a web-based like button aside from using the officially supported options
Those options doesn't require using OAuth or the Open Graph api. However, facebook just added support for mobile apps to send like actions through opengraph.
I'm not sure if they intend to allow sites to customize their like buttons or just apps...
Liking works for me with the iOS SDK using the graph api:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/likes/