Get Facebook referral URL in Google Analytics

Question

In my Google Analytics reports I get "facebook.com / referral" as the source. Is it possible to get the exact URL?

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

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!

Comments

[Yahel]

This doesn't work for Facebook, which launders the url through a redirect-er; everything will just be /l.php

[Lifechess]

It is because we want to know if the visitor came from their Facebook business page. But I get that it may be the wrong way to look at it.

[Eduardo]

If you want to see how many people come from their business page you should definitively look into campaign tagged urls. Make sure the links on the business page are tagged. Alternatively you can create a specific landing page that you send your users to.

[user734063]

This GA post is 4 years old. Analytics has changed completely.