What do I use to build a robust referrer tracking system?

Question

I've just started working for a client using facebook ads, and the problem they are having is that their logs don't match facebook's claimed click-through-rate.

I'm not asking anyone to code this for me, but just a pointer in the right direction.

Basically I know the referrer is potentially unreliable, FB say as much themselves, so I guess it'll be something like this:

1. Ad with unique url to intermediate page (this is the bit I'm interested in - what's best? php script to handle incoming or URL with appended values or other?)
2. intermediate page records visit into database
3. Intermediate page redirects user to main page

Does anyone have any examples or experience to help me answer this?

Edit Since I posted this I've been talking to a few poeple, and taking the comments onboard. What I found was that there is a school of thought that the time that a page loads may affect if someone is recorded in the access logs or not.

The suggestion goes "step 5 is the problem":

1. User clicks
2. behind ad is FB intermediate URL not your URL
3. On landing at FB Click is recorded and user redirected to your URL
4. User arrives at your server, page is sent
5. User receives page

But as we are surely talking almost virtually imperceptable time between step 1 and 4 it does seem possible to set up a check that would not fail to match FBs results more closely a dummy page would take no time to load at all especially if all it does is redirect.

I'll post my findings.

Answer 1

This is a known mystery using facebook ads.

Facebook says - You're website / page / app had 1000 clicks... every way we track it (our own tracking, raw logs, google analytics) shows we had maybe 300 at most.

Try getting an answers from facebook. We did, and with no luck.

The only thing that really matters is conversion, and if it makes sense to keep paying for FB ads.

One thing we did do was to reduce our Bid to the lowest possible value without causing them to stop.

Other friends of mine swear by CPM rather than CPC on facebook, although we didn't see much benefit.

At the end of the day... make sure your conversion numbers are good enough to pay facebook.

Still smells a bit to me though.

Answer 2

If you could control the banner image (not being static on the Facebook side), you could kind of generate a unique number and save it on a database. Then, when people click on the banner, that unique number would be on the link and you could check if the number was generated or not.

This way, you would know for sure the number of banners displayed and banners clicked and facebook could not just increase click count. Perhaps that's what where the missing clicks are... (banners displayed/banners clicked).

Answer 3

If your customer does not trust facebook, they should ask facebook, not you because there is not much of what you can do about that social problem.