…and Tips for Better Tracking

More and more of our clients ask for advice regarding how best to use Facebook as an effective means for driving more traffic to their websites.  This is increasingly important as recognized by comScore who recently reported that about one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is viewed on a social networking Web site like MySpace and Facebook. While our Yield Web Marketing Suite doesn’t include a Facebook module (yet!), we don’t hesitate recommending its use as part of an overall Web marketing strategy.

Simply put, Facebook is an excellent source of traffic for your web site. There are a variety of ways you can attract traffic:

1. Post a link on your wall
2. Post a link on someone else’s wall (make sure it is relevant!)
3. Create a fan page for your business and post links on your fan page wall
4. Buy Facebook ads

With that said, the harder part comes from interpreting where your traffic is coming from. In Google Analytics, you will see that your Facebook traffic is coming from two primary sources:

1. facebook.com (referral)
2. apps.facebook.com (referral)

Obviously, neither of these sources definitively tell you which Facebook links are driving the traffic, or which ads are driving the traffic. They merely tell you the page that a visitor was viewing when they clicked on your link or ad.

For example, if someone on their home page clicks on a link you posted, the referrer will be facebook.com (specifically it will be from http://www.facebook.com/home.php). Consequently, if someone clicks on an ad while on their home pagel, they will have the same referrer. However, the first click is an unpaid link and the second is a paid ad.

Another thing to watch when analyzing Facebook referrers is that for paid ads, the referring link isn’t very relevant. It just indicates the page someone was on when they clicked your ad. You will see many referrers from “apps.facebook.com”. These are typically paid ads clicked on while someone was using a Facebook application. For example, if someone clicks on your ad while playing a game like Farm Town, Mafia Wars or Texas Hold’Em, the referrer will be apps.facebook.com (specifically, for example, http://apps.facebook.com/farmtown/play/), which is the domain for all Facebook applications.

If you really want to find out which links are driving your Facebook traffic (which you should), the best way is to add tracking parameters to the end of the destination URL for each ad or link. (Don’t let the following rather complex-looking URL structure intimidate you; the more you work with these, the more intuitive they’ll become).

For example, when posting an unpaid link to drive traffic to www.yourcompany.com/offer, post the url in the following format:

www.yourcompany.com/offer/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=link_location&utm_content=link_description

The bits of this URL that are in italics and bold is where you should put specific information that tells you the link description and its location.  Likewise, when creating an ad to drive traffic to www.yourcompany.com/offer, make the destination url:

www.yourcompany.com/offer/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaigncampaign_name&utm_content=ad_name

Assuming you use Google Analytics for your site, go to Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources, then click on either the “facebook / referrer” or “facebook /cpc” rows and in the Dimension drop-down, select either “Campaign” or “Ad Content” to get the details.