Get Facebook referral URL in Google Analytics - facebook

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/

Related

gclid and fbclid at same time

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.

UTM tracking for the Social Share Buttons: Facebook, Pinterest

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.

New app not available in list for "insights for your website"

I created a new app last week with the purpose of using Facebook insights for our website, but it is not available in the list to make the connection with. Do I need to do anything to make the app selectable?
For any of you people who think this question is not technical and shouldn't be here, I was directed here from Facebook bugs because it's not a bug.
I have had the same issue but after a bit of experimenting I found that it does not affect the ability for you to claim a domain and associate it with an app.
What the drop down list does is generate the code snippet shown below. I'm guessing this was useful when you was able to link it to a page_id (you can no longer do this). As long as you have put the correct meta tag (such as that below, replacing %%app_id%% with the app_id given by the Facebook App Center) you are free to ignore what account is shown in the drop down.
<meta property='fb:app_id' content='%%app_id%%'/>
Once you have linked the account you can go back to the Facebook App Center and set permission on the account.
Tip: While you can only give other verified developers Manager access to the app you can add any friend or email address to the insights level of access which is all which they need.
Not sure if this is the case here. But I do know that there is a threshold to see insights with regard to pages.
As detailed here in the FAQ's -
Is there a minimum number of users to see Insights for Pages? Yes. For
user privacy reasons, Insights are only provided to Pages with greater
than 30 users who like that Page.
Perhaps there is a limit for domain insights too. You should allow some time and some traffic pass before the insights start being able to give feedback...
I had the same error, I tried to debug my site here FB Debugger
which is the official debugger you can input URL, Access Token, or Open Graph Action ID.
It works for me.

How can I like a post/comment in facebook fan page from my custom website

I am importing the posts and comments in my FB fan page to my custom website. I am importing using graph api. In the response array I am getting two types of action URL for "comments" and "likes".
See below :
http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899
Using this link in following code
<fb:like href="http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899" width="450" height="80"/>
I get the following error
The page at http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899 could not be reached.
How can I like these posts or comments from my website? Is there any solution for that?
I think--I'm no expert here--that redirects such as this are controlled by Facebook, with a cross-site scripting policy file on their servers that say whether or not they will allow redirects and to who. On my website for example I allow anybody to cross link, since I'm just a little guy, but I bet Facebook only allows it with preferred partners like various corporations, see the story below. That would be my best guess.
Paul
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/09/15/facebook-may-be-adding-cross-linking-to-foursquare-yelp-gowalla-and-more-on-pages/
Facebook may be adding cross-linking to Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and more on Pages
Facebook appears to have added cross-linking between Pages and other location-based sites like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and SCVNGR to its Pages, reports Scribbal. Tech evangelist Robert Scoble posted a notice on his Google+ profile earlier today that indicated a new partnership between Foursquare and Facebook as the Page for a place was shown to direct viewers to the comparable location on Foursquare.
The links appear off to the left underneath the ‘Like’ count and checkin count on a location’s page. The only question that remains is whether the users are activating these connections themselves or if it is something that is done automatically. This could be Facebook’s plan to integrate itself with other location sites now that it has distributed the Facebook Places features throughout its framework.
Facebook has been on a tear lately, adding the Subscribe button and smart Friends list features just this week, as well as Facebook integration into the new Skype for Mac. It is clearly making an effort to maintain its lead over Google+ as the preeminent social network and it doesn’t want lack of features to be a reason for anyone to quit it.
We have reached out to Facebook about this new feature and will update this post when we hear back.

How to merge comment stream on Facebook events and my own website

I have a website that allows people to post events and it automatically posts their events to facebook if they so choose. I also integrated facebook comments on the event pages on my website.
Is it possible to merge the comments that people leave on my website's event pages with the comments that people leave on the facebook event page that was automatically made for them? I can't seem to find any documentation on this.
Edit: Just to clarify: The comments on my website are done via the facebook-comments API, they are not a module of my application.
Adding a separate answer, as after clarification it's significantly different.
If you want to basically have the wall of your event show up on your website, you can use the Event API to pull in wallposts and display them. To be able to post to that wall, you would have to do some custom coding to authenticate the user with publish_stream permission and then have a form on your site that would post to the event's wall, as noted in the post section of the above link.
Someone may have done this already and put code out there, but I doubt there is an easier way to get your ideal situation up and running. This use case isn't as automagic as the comments box, unfortunately.
If you're just looking to spread your events socially, however, the comments box will post to the commenters' walls with a link to your event page, which can then in turn point them to the Faecbook event. You might be able to use the Facebook event's URL as the URL for your comment box on the website, so it would just post a link directly to the Facebook event, but I'm not sure on that one.
I looked at this in my app, and we ended up deciding to just maintain separate streams. This is because it's only a one-way integration - you can get comments from Facebook via the Graph API and format them on your own website, in-line with your website comments, but there's no way to push comments from your website up to Facebook.
You could, if you wanted, just use the Facebook comment form for all comments - this has been done by big sites such as TechCrunch, and is effective, but it requires users to have a Facebook, AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail account. Whether you want to do that or not depends on your preferences and userbase.
there a tool that combines comments form different pages or different sources
Check https://feedgun.com which works on pulling comments from different sources like YouTube videos, existing wordpress sites, facebook comments plugins and even DIsqus account and combine them all together and publish them on any of your webpages, and it all works automatically once you set them where to pull and where to publish.