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Automatically tracking shared url from Facebook, as GA already does

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Level 1

2/20/13

It would be nice to know, in the source of traffic, the shared url from Facebook. We have the referring domain. It would provide better insight if we could have what url was shared on Facebook. Since Google Analytics does it out of the box now, I assume Adobe can also upgrade its tools with that function. Because asking our Community Manager to add tracking campaign codes to every single post is not feasable.

 

Thanks!

14 Comments

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Employee

2/20/13

Pier-Olivier, do you simply mean the full referring URL? Can you give me an example so I can better understand the request? 

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Level 1

2/21/13

This is what I mean : the actual url that was shard on Facebook. I know my referring domain is facebook.com. What I am interested in is which link shared on Facebook truly generated visits. Here is a print screen of what GA does. Let me know if there is already a way to get that info or if you have any more questions.

 

Have a nice day!Shard URL.JPG

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Employee

2/21/13

Very helpful. It seems like this is really just an Entry Pages (or Entry Page URLs) report built around a segment defined as "Page Views where Referring Domain = facebook.com." It's not doing anything to label the link as best I can tell; it's simply showing the landing page since that should be the same as the link. Is that a fair assessment? 

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Level 1

2/21/13

It seems to me as your assessment is correct. I did not think about it that way.

 

So in your opinion, is there a way that I could configure this kind of report on my own pretty easily and get the same kind of info?

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Employee

2/21/13

Yes, I think so. Try building this segment: 

 

Screen Shot 2013-02-21 at 11.05.24 AM.png

 

Then apply it to the Pages report. Bookmark that report or create a Custom Report and you should be all set. However, I'd like to still see how many people are interested in having this report available out of the box. So your idea is still very interesting, but hopefully you can address the need immediately via workaround! Smiley Happy

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Employee

2/21/13

Actually, come to think of it, you might not want Path Length = 1 in that segment. Some users may click through from a Facebook link multiple times in a visit, and the segment described above would exclude any clicks that did not create a new visit. 

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Level 1

2/21/13

It seems to work. I just have a quick question relating to this way of getting the info :

 

It appears that by using that segment and using it in the pages report, I get visits that included this page, not necessarily visits that started with this page. Is this correct?

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Employee

2/21/13

That's what the "Path Length = 1" is supposed to accomplish. It's also very important that you use the Page Views container, not the Visits container, since using Visits would include all subsequent PVs during the visit. 

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Level 1

2/21/13

Great, thanks for all those quick anwwers today. I truly appreciate the time and effort you put in making my life easier.

 

But let's say I want to push this a step further. GA provides the landing page, a visit count (but I prefer Omniture's instances), and total page views of the visit which started from this landing page. The solution you gave me provides page views of this landing page only.

 

I realize that what I am trying to do is consider those landing pages (from facebook or any other social network) as single campaigns, so I can track what traffic they brought, video views, pages per visit, etc., but withouth having to put a tracking code on every single url that was shared.

 

Any thoughts on this?

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Employee

2/21/13

Ah, that's a great question. You would probably need to use a separate segment. A Visit container containing the Page View container shown above should give you "downstream Page Views."