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Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

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Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#11

Post by soared »

Author failed to do any research, instead of going for the typical "FB is doing something secretive and cryptic" angle. Related links that explain this:

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-attribution-...

https://marketingland.com/facebook-attribution-now-available...

https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/9pycuk/facebook_atti...

This hn thread is a perfect example of a news bubble. Googling "fbclid" returns the answer in the first result, but hn votes up an article that has no information and treats it as some secret tracking that fb has implemented. HN is excessively biased against any discussion of tracking/analytics on the internet. The community allows no room for true discussion - only blatantly biased opinions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/9o52yw/parameter...

Edit - reworded to be less aggressive

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#13

Post by kposehn »

This is actually fantastic news for advertisers that have their own data warehouses and need to create a better 1-to-1 click tracking to internal user data. This allows much better attribution and testing of incrementality so businesses can tell where their value is truly coming from.

I’m pretty excited to see this roll out more broadly.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#14

Post by lolc »

kees99 wrote: post #7

I wonder why would fb move away from the well-established utm [1] link parameters to this? From the article, I can't see any functional difference. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters

First time I read about UTM. It looks like those parameters are used to track ad campaigns. They provide metrics over which campaign works best.

The "fbclid" parameters on the other hand seems intended to track individual clicks. That is, Facebook wants to keep tracking individuals when they follow links to off-site pages.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#15

Post by soared »

kees99 wrote: post #7

I wonder why would fb move away from the well-established utm [1] link parameters to this? From the article, I can't see any functional difference. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters

UTM are used for a website's own anayltics while fbclid will link users actions on a website to advertising done on facebook and report on it within fb. UTMs just track where a user came from, fbclid will track who a user is and match it back to fb ads.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#16

Post by radus »

soared wrote: post #11

Author failed to do any research, instead of going for the typical "FB is doing something secretive and cryptic" angle. Related links that explain this: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-attribution-... https://marketingland.com/facebook-attribution-now-available... https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/9pycuk/facebook_atti... This hn thread is a perfect example of a news bubble. Googling "fbclid" ret…

Not really seeing the comments here as jumping to the conclusion that this is a totally secretive and nefarious practice. I think most people here are used to links being instrumented with tracking of this sort.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#17

Post by vntok »

techaddict009 wrote: post #12

This might cause issue of duplication for sites which do not have canonical URL implemented.

Google is pretty good at automatically determining which qquery parameters actually modify the response content (pagenb=, id=, q=, etc.) and which do not really (sortby=, highlight=, utm_source=, gclid=) so that should not be a problem.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#18

Post by teaneedz »

kposehn wrote: post #13

This is actually fantastic news for advertisers that have their own data warehouses and need to create a better 1-to-1 click tracking to internal user data. This allows much better attribution and testing of incrementality so businesses can tell where their value is truly coming from. I’m pretty excited to see this roll out more broadly.

And another reason for me to avoid FB links. I'm sure blockers will begin stripping that out.

FB just doesn't understand the optics they create.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#19

Post by maemilius »

soared wrote: post #11

Author failed to do any research, instead of going for the typical "FB is doing something secretive and cryptic" angle. Related links that explain this: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-attribution-... https://marketingland.com/facebook-attribution-now-available... https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/9pycuk/facebook_atti... This hn thread is a perfect example of a news bubble. Googling "fbclid" ret…

This article was posted days before any of the links you've given.

According to the metadata for the site, it was originally published on 2018-10-14 and last updated 2018-10-16.

Facebook's own article about the feature came out 5 days after this article was published. So, at the time, Facebook _was_ being secretive about it. Aside from that one line, the entire article reads more like "this is new, I wonder what it does".

Lastly, when I googled "fbclid" the top 3 articles are completely unrelated to Facebook (but, then, I'm not in marketing so this doesn't surprise me) and the forth is this very article.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#20

Post by canadianwriter »

techaddict009 wrote: post #12

This might cause issue of duplication for sites which do not have canonical URL implemented.

Well yeah... but so would utm's and the millions of other CID's out there. Adobe... GCLID... the list goes on. You need a canonical.
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