CODEWITHSUNDEEP
facebookfacebook-graph-apigoogle-analyticsmobile-safari
Phyllis Sutherland
Phyllis Sutherland

Reputation: 307

m.facebook.com / referrals for Safari in Google Analytics Improperly Tracked

My google analytics tracking code works well for all traffic streams except for m.facebook.com referrals on the Safari browser. For these users, GA only records 1 pageview, avg session duration of 0, and bounce rate of 100% - this of course can't be correct. Here's a screenshot of GA separated by browser:

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I assume there is a technical issue going on here, since a 100% bounce rate is impossible when compared to the other browsers which are working. I've QAed extensively and it seems that these people still access the site well, but tracking is not working for everyone.

Any ideas on what's going on here? Ways to debug it further? Has anyone had this problem before? Does it happen on your sites too--is it a global problem?

A few thoughts:

  1. It is probable that these people are using the native Facebook browser in the FB app which then loads a replica of their default browser. Maybe this double layer is preventing tracking? If true, then why does Safari (in-app) seem to be working which is where the Facebook browser using Safari should show? If embedded Safari works, then why not regular Safari? Embedded works, but non-embedded does not.

  2. Maybe there is an http / https issue going on here.

  3. Maybe there is an ad-tracking, cookie, domain blocking policy preventing this, but again why not for both Safaris?

  4. The bounce rate on Chrome seems elevated too.

  5. Maybe a javascript error happens after loading GA on this particular browser / environment. But then why does it report the first page, but not others? Users seem to not be affected by this error; just tracking is. The Facebook JS API and adsense ads are loaded afterwards. Adsense ads on safari get a lot of errors and cross-domain preventions. - this happens on another site without the FB api.

  6. Normal mobile safari not referred by m.facebook.com acts entirely normally.

Any help / thoughts / insight would be much appreciated! Does this happen on your social traffic too?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1604

Answers (1)

Phyllis Sutherland
Phyllis Sutherland

Reputation: 307

Facebook is not reporting certain automated accesses as bots. Their listed protocol is here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler

But they also frequently come with:

referrer: http://m.facebook.com browser: Safari platform: iOS user_agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.1.38 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Mobile/15A372 Safari/604.1

There is no real way to check that they are bots except to do a reverse IP lookup and see that their ISP is Facebook Inc like where the listed bots originate: facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php), facebookexternalhit/1.1, and Facebot.

Google analytics does not recognize that this traffic is bot traffic and so it is reported in stats.

Upvotes: 0

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