Are you finding a huge discrepancy between your Facebook Analytics and your Google Analytics?

You are not alone. As social media advertising opportunities continue to emerge, the emphasis on the importance of reliable web analytics is more important than ever. Web analytics are a pillar of any successful social marketing campaign. Analytics provide an accurate report of traffic coming from networking sites on which you are conducting marketing efforts, and serve as a vital tool in aligning traffic results with your marketing goals.

Facebook Ads are a very low cost and deeply targeted social marketing option. While Facebook  is a brilliant platform for matching your product to a niche market, advertisers are coming across a common problem in consistency when tracking Facebook Ads via Google Analytics. The clicks advertisers are paying for from Facebook are not matching the recorded hits from Facebook on Google Analytics.

So what is the problem? Google is not tracking the traffic source as Facebook. It is likely that your ads are going through a redirect or a rewrite that is causing both the referring data and the URL parameters to be stripped off. Facebook redirects users when sending them to the site. Therefore Google Analytics does not trace the source back to Facebook, due the redirect striping from the referring code.

Is there a way to effectively monitor my Facebook Traffic using Google Analytics?

 The answer is “Yes”. Don’t worry Facebook is not scamming you.  There is a simple solution to this frustrating problem, tag your Facebook Ad itself with the source so that it can be captured when someone comes to your website. Luckily, these can be quickly generated using Google’s URL Builder Tool.  Appending a unique identifier to a link, tells Google that, “Any actions by this visitor should be attributed to this particular campaign.” By linking a Facebook Ad to a tagged URL, you are classifying the traffic for Google Analytics.

If your Google Analytics Account has been linked to an active Google AdWords account (Google’s PPC Advertising platform) there is no need to tag your AdWords links. When someone hits this page; the tracking script automatically pulls the information in and categorizes it.

Another option for tracking Facebook Traffic using Google Analytics is using a unique landing page for your Facebook ads. Google analytics will then show you which hits come from your Facebook ad and let you analyze bounce rate, unique visitors, click numbers etc. Then visits to this unique landing page from Facebook would have the source and campaign name set as “Facebook”, and the medium set as “social”.

Although the tracking of Facebook ads does not have to be complicated, many advertisers may not be aware of the restrictions of tracking social media using Google Analytics. All of your tracking and campaign management efforts can go to waste if basic analytic maintenance is not accurately recorded.

In order to have a successful marketing campaign that includes social networking efforts,  the campaign must be consistently and accurately monitored. The attention to detail when reviewing analytics is necessary to produce realistic and actionable data –  a cornerstone in analyzing the impact of your social media marketing campaign.