Google Analytics doesn't show social traffic

[masoll]

My analytics property doesn't register any clicks from social networks (Facebook). It does register active users (real time trackin) though, meaning the property should be set up correctly. It also shows activity from referral spam - but no clicks from Facebook. Does anyone have an idea? I just can't come up with an answer.

[RhinoFish]

You talking about clicks on FB Ads or your Facebook page content?
If Ads, have you tagged your FB Ad URLs with utm tags to track properly?

[masoll]

Hi there, thanks for your reply - no, I am not talking about ads, I am talking about Facebook content links. I know they are themselves registered as nofollow, but a click should be registered by Analytics, right? I had several FB accounts clicking (all from the same computer, though) but none of the the clicks were registered. I have no idea why.

[ergophobe]

Are a lot of people sharing your content or are these links that you are putting out there?

If the latter, you can get advanced tracking by adding utm_source, utm_medium, and then use a URL shortener so that those params stay on;

[RhinoFish]

Yep, you could tag them, best way.

But when you look in Source / Medium (Include, Source / Medium, Regex, facebook) you will likely see them as referrals.

Decent article here:
[jonloomer.com...]

You should be able to find them under Referrals.

They should also be aggregated under Channels, Social, Facebook.

[masoll]

Thank, you that sounds like a good idea. Just as an update: I receive the clicks now - but I wonder why didn't before. A change I did was explicitly listing the site under "properties" and "social settings". I didn't do that with other sites before, and their analytics do receive social traffic.
How about cookies? Scenario: Before opening Facebook I delete all cookies. Then I click on the link on Facebook, the site opens and plants a new cookie. Does this cookie contain information about from where the site has been called? If not, then that could be a reason for my clicks not being registered. I just don't exactly know what kind of information those tracking cookies contain.

[RhinoFish]

There is a reporting delay, it varies across sales, goals, and traffic. For traffic, always give it an hour or so, for other metrics, give it 3-4 hours.

G knows which sites are Social, most of the time, and certainly for FB, you don't have to tell Analytics which domains are the Social referrers.

Cookie help unify different visits and follow-on pages, the initial page visit just needs the Analytics script on the page, a referrer header (FB provides that) or utm tagged URLs.

[masoll]

In this case there must something else totally wrong in my setup: nor Analytics nor Majestic do register a backlink I put on one of my other sites to the one in question. After three days this link is not registerd. Also the beforementioned social referrals were registerd on two days only. I had some referrals from LinkedIn, and they aren't registerd either.
That makes me think...
Could this have to do with either a wrong statement in the htaccess file? Or maybe something to do with URL forwarding? I am kind of getting lost here... There is no robots.txt file to prevent the site from crawling...

[RhinoFish]

Redirects can drop the utm parameters, obfuscate the initial inbound referrer header, and many other things can go wrong too.

But it's very simple to troubleshoot. :-)

When you see link on FB or LinkedIn, copy it and paste it into notepad. Click it, then when you land on the page, in the URL / address bar, copy it and compare. Assuming you used tagged links, do you see the utm params in both? If you didn't tag the URLs, and are relying on Analytics to detect the referrer header to identify the source site, are the two URLs the same? Does the landing page have the Analytics script on it?