How to Determine the Source of Facebook Traffic

[aristotle]

I've never been a member of Facebook and don't have any Like Buttons on any of my sites. But they still get quite a bit of traffic that appears to come from Facebook, according to my logs. But when I try to track a visit back to a specific page on Facebook, I always get a message that says I'm forbidden to see the page.

Does anyone know of a way for me to determine the specific source or sources of this traffic that appears to come from Facebook?

[shashank]

I think it's happening because you need to create a FB account before you see those pages. It's not true for every page out there, however, some requires you to have either an account or your IP/Country could also be banned from viewing that particular page.

BTW what analytics software are you using? If you are using GA you don't get full referral url, however, you can create some advanced filters to do so. Visit - www[dot]reubenyau[dot]com/google-analytics-hack-obtaining-full-referring-url/ to know more about tracking full referral url from any website using GA.

Here, in my post - GA = Google Analytics and FB = Facebook :)

[topr8]

>>Does anyone know of a way for me to determine the specific source or sources of this traffic that appears to come from Facebook?

your log files will show this.

but i should think this is where a user has posted a link to your site on their page for whatever reason(which you cannot see unless you are a friend of theirs anyway - most likely)

[matrix_jan]

aristotle,

You have no access to people's personal "walls", you will never know where the traffic came from, unless it is available to the public. Only Facebook Pages and few users post as "available to public". To find those pages just google "site:facebook.com landing page url, the domain, or the title of your landing page".

[timsoulo]

same with Twitter - you can't get URLs of tweets bringing you traffic.. so I guess we just have to live with that :)