How to Track Facebook Referrals
You spend a lot of time working on your social media strategy and managing each of the platforms -- but how do you know if your efforts are bearing any fruit? While it can be helpful to check out the "Insights" provided about the content you post within Facebook, it's also important to know how many people are going from your Facebook page to your website. To do this, you can use the analytics tools available to your on your website platform, or track your referrals using one of several online third-party tools.
Instructions
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Google Analytics
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Navigate to the Google Analytics site and click "Access Analytics" if you already have your account set up to track your website. If not, click "Sign Up Now" and follow the prompts to set up a Google Analytics account.
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Click "View Report" from the middle of the page, once you are logged in and looking at the Overview page.
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Click "Traffic Sources" from the left hand side of the Dashboard page, then click "Referring Sites" from the drop-down menu that appears.
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View the list of sites that have sent visitors to your website from the "Source" column in the middle of the page. Look for a link that starts with "http://www.facebook.com" and click on it. This will take you into more detailed information about the number of visits from Facebook.
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Click on the date near the top right of the page to adjust the date range you are looking at. This can help you track Facebook referrals by viewing how many people have visited during one period of time versus another. If one period of time got more traffic than another, look back at your Facebook page to get an idea of what types of posts you were putting up during that time.
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Click on the tabs next to the "Views" subheading to get a look at different types of information and how it can be viewed. Click on "Performance" to get an idea of the performance of your Facebook page in referring people to your site, versus other sites that have referred people to your page.
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Click on "export" near the top of the page to save the document as a PDF and save it for later. Keep the report on file and use it to compare to the analytics numbers you gather at another time in the future.
Bit.ly
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Use a link shortening service such as bit.ly to shorten your links before you put them on your Facebook profile or page. To do this, navigate to the bit.ly website and enter your link into the "shorten" box, then click "shorten." This will generate a short URL that you can place into a status update. The benefit of doing this is that you can now track the URL using bit.ly's analytics tool.
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Copy the shortened link and paste it into a Facebook status update. To do some comparisons later on, it's helpful to also paste the same link into a tweet on Twitter or into another status update on any other social site you regularly use.
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Navigate back to the bit.ly site after you have placed your link on Facebook and given people a little time to click the link. So long as you're using the same computer you used to create the link, all the links you have shortened should appear in a list below bit.ly's "shorten" box. Click on "Info Page+" next to the link you want to track to access the analytics for that link.
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Scroll down to "Referrers Detail." There you will see a pie chart detailing how much traffic each referring site -- including Facebook -- has sent to the link you provided. Click on the Facebook URL from under the pie chart to see which pages on Facebook have sent incoming links to your page. This may be helpful to see if other people have shared your link, and if the people they shared it with in turn clicked in to your page. Another helpful part of the bit.ly statistics page is the "conversations" section near the top of the page. There you can do a bit of comparing to see which social sites provided the most buzz about your link.
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