Website Referral Traffic - Facebook

[ukaskew]

Does anyone know if it’s possible to narrow down to specific posts/groups where referrals have come from on Facebook? I’m getting a fairly significant amount of traffic to my site these days and a lot of it seems to be fairly focussed as most is coming directly to specific blog posts. I have a Facebook page but it’s rarely used and doesn’t contain any obvious links to my site, and I’ve not personally linked to any of my website blog posts on Facebook.

I would imagine they are generally public pages on Facebook as the likes of Fuji UK and Fuji Australia are often drivers of traffic to my site on Twitter etc. Twitter is pretty straightforward, I may have a day when a load of traffic comes via twitter and a quick search of a few key words relating to the blog post finds the specific tweet in no time. Similar for forums, if somebody links to a post I’ve written the analytic tool will literally direct me straight to the specific forum post.

My site is hosted on Squarespace and I’m just using their standard analytic tools.

 

[nass]

If you find out, do please post here. I get 100s of FB referrals a month but there's no way to track down the URL that referred them, be it in a group, a person, wherever. It's very annoying the way FB is such a closed partitioned greedy network that doesn't give out the information the normal decent webmasters need. You can do searches and socialsearcher searches and FB API searches but the amount of info I get back is minimal. Bah.

 

[StewartR]

Does anyone know if it’s possible to narrow down to specific posts/groups where referrals have come from on Facebook? ..... I have a Facebook page but it’s rarely used and doesn’t contain any obvious links to my site, and I’ve not personally linked to any of my website blog posts on Facebook.

Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious or having a senior moment, but ... if your site isn't linked from Facebook, and your blog posts aren't linked from Facebook, then surely the traffic hasn't come from Facebook?

 

[StewartR]

However, if traffic is coming from links which you have created, can you help the tracking by tweaking the links to identify the source?

For example, this is a link to a page on my website:
http://www.lensesforhire.co.uk/product/canon-ef-200mm-f2-l-is-usm
but if I had several links to that page on places like Facebook then I might not necessarily be able to tell exactly which of those several links had been clicked.

However, this is also a link to the same page:
http://www.lensesforhire.co.uk/prod...s-usm?source=tp-facebook-referrals-discussion
and if somebody clicks on that, I hope my analytics package would be able to tell me that the visitor had clicked this link, rather than the generic link without the parameterisation. Then of course I just need to make the parameter meaningful in terms of identifying the source (it means nothing t my website and has no functionality) and Robert is your mother's brother.

Unfortunately I'm not in the office today and don't have access to Google Analytics to test this. Can anyone else confirm whether or not it would work?

 

[ukaskew]

Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious or having a senior moment, but ... if your site isn't linked from Facebook, and your blog posts aren't linked from Facebook, then surely the traffic hasn't come from Facebook?

This is precisely why I was interested, as it must have been someone else linking to my blog. After some Google searching of keywords relating to the pages that were getting a lot of hits (in the thousands, so not insignificant for a personal blog) I found that various Fuji groups (including Fuji of Australia) had posted a link to one of my blog posts. Somebody in the X-T1 thread here also kindly pointed out that the same blog post had been posted in another Fuji group.

One of the posts linking back to my site had over 200 likes and 20 shares, which would go some way to accounting for the high volume of traffic.

 

[nass]

Yep, there's referrals from m.facebook.com, l.facebook.com, www.facebook.com - with long string parameters, but they don't tell you the group, person, context - anything really. Annoying.