Referral Data Q's

[kirmeliux]

1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure.

I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data?

My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through?

2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again?

I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.

[kirmeliux]

Hi Tom,

Yes, we ran ads for both Desktop and Mobile. Yes, there was a correlation. lm.facebook.com shows the same numbers as Facebook Network Referrals and they're all Mobile traffic. lm is the redirect for Mobile, I believe.

[kirmeliux]

Thank you for the response, Peter. I appreciate the help.

[Mobilio]

So...

1 - there are many Facebooks - desktop, mobile (few versions), 0 (mobile and text only), iOS app, Android app and many other. So why this is important - some of them strip UTM tagging, other pass them and 3rd sent direct traffic. Example - mobile apps sent direct traffic - there isn't referral. From mobile/desktop web - due stripping HTTPS to HTTP referral is also stripping so you get direct traffic. That's why you need to start working little bit with your HTTP web log files and analyses them. There you can find pattern.

Also i heard (but i'm not tested this) that Facebook uses canonical URL of page. So when you make ads Facebook bot come and crawl page content, extracting canonical and later ignore your UTM parameters. As i said - i only heard about this so i can't confirm or deny this. That's why you need to implement "facebook tracking pixel".

That's why some of campaigns there are passed over URL shorteners as - bit.ly, ow.ly or other. Because you can check what's passed to shortener before come to your site. I won't recommend this because one more redirector is killing mobile performance with between 300-600ms (or over!) delay.

2. Yes. Since your site is HTTP this strip referrers from HTTPS. Clicks from desktop apps are direct and there isn't referrer. Also please note that there is new HTML tag about this:
https://moz.com/blog/meta-referrer-tag
and there you can be restricted also what kind of information will be shared with you from browser.

[TomRayner]

Regarding Q1) I'm just wondering - did you run these ads on both desktop and mobile?  And if so, can you see any correlation between the lm.facebook.com referral and the 'proper social traffic' and the device that they came from?