Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

thisinterestsme.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 91 posts

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#21

Post by lolc »

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…

Your first two links don't contain any technical information about the "fbclid" parameter. They can be read to understand why Facebook does it, but not how. I see how it is useful to get this info when I'm paying Facebook for views. But that's something different from understanding how it works. So articles like this are needed to piece together what is going on.

Now the interesting question will be whether "fbclid" can be tied to individuals. And I couldn't readily find this info in the links you posted. Maybe I'm bad at reading?

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#22

Post by johannes1234321 »

vntok wrote: post #9
lolc wrote: post #5

So they're modifying URL? Facebook is breaking things. But sure, they've run the numbers and decided they don't care. Browsers will now have to resort to removing query parameters to prevent tracking. And websites should really use click-to-enable sharing buttons to prevent Facebook from snooping on everything.

My guesstimate is that the number of URLs that are shared on Facebook AND that already have a completely orthogonal "fbclid" parameter is infinitesimal. Maybe among the URLs shared on Facebook there are a few whose servers only respond to a fixed amount of parameters, changing their behaviour when additional unused parameters are appended to the query string, but I imagine that the number of such cases is so low it's…

> What exactly is Facebook breaking, in your opinion? > > Would Facebook also break things if they were instead making an async request to the destination and appending a custom header to it, something like "X-Coming-From-Facebook"?

Extra headers are typically ignored, not only since different clients send different headers since the beginning.

I know multiple systems which however decode the query string and complain about unknown options or don't accept a query string at all for some resources. On the later case it is ignorance on the other case it is intensive input validation.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#24

Post by SonnyWortzik »

teaneedz wrote: post #18
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.

They do, and we do. But the mass sheep audience does not. All they know is: "Does the link work?" and "Can I share it?" That's all.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#25

Post by lmkg »

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

Web marketing analyst here.

UTM parameters tag campaigns at the aggregate level, to be used for reporting. The fbclid is almost-certainly unique to the click. While you could make, e.g., utm content unique per-click that's not what it's for. Anything in a UTM parameter is intended to be human-readable, and will almost certainly appear as-is in a report somewhere. Click ID parameters are internal IDs used to join data sources, which is not the type of data that should go into UTM parameters.

Note that Google Analytics, the tool that invented UTM parameters, itself does not use UTM parameters when it does this sort of thing. Google Analytics uses the gclid (AdWords) or dclid (DoubleClick) to join against user or click level data from other tools.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#26

Post by guitarbill »

kageneko wrote: post #23
berbec wrote: post #2

I can see urls eventually being thousands of characters long with referral links daisy chained.

I use Neat URL[0] with Firefox to strip things like that from URLs. 0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-url/

That's cool, but only really protects the surfer. Instead of stripping them, you could also either fill them with garbage values, or with more effort, swap the parameters with another link. This would degrade the analytics results, but might be harder to detect. And if enough people used it, you'd get some kind of herd tracking immunity.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#27

Post by lmkg »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #22
vntok wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guesstimate is that the number of URLs that are shared on Facebook AND that already have a completely orthogonal "fbclid" parameter is infinitesimal. Maybe among the URLs shared on Facebook there are a few whose servers only respond to a fixed amount of parameters, changing their behaviour when additional unused parameters are appended to the query string, but I imagine that the number of such cases is so low it's…

> What exactly is Facebook breaking, in your opinion? > > Would Facebook also break things if they were instead making an async request to the destination and appending a custom header to it, something like "X-Coming-From-Facebook"? Extra headers are typically ignored, not only since different clients send different headers since the beginning. I know multiple systems which however decode the query string and complai…

This is the reason why Google Analytics can be configured to read marketing parameters out of the hash fragment instead of the query string. A surprising number of sites will choke when unexpected data shows up in either the query string or the hash fragment, but very few will choke on both (most sites that mishandle query parameters are from an era before rich use of fragments became common).

Notably, most links with GA marketing parameters are under the control of the website owner. Facebook links are not. This makes such a work-around less feasible.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#28

Post by kolmogorov »

lolc wrote: post #21
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…

Your first two links don't contain any technical information about the "fbclid" parameter. They can be read to understand why Facebook does it, but not how. I see how it is useful to get this info when I'm paying Facebook for views. But that's something different from understanding how it works. So articles like this are needed to piece together what is going on. Now the interesting question will be whether "fbclid"…

This will most likely be the same as gclid for AdWords . You can’t tie it back to individuals for gclid and I’d expect the same there .

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#29

Post by soared »

maemilius wrote: post #19
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 d…

That is fair, I didn't check when the author posted.

The first link (for me) when googling fbclid is the reddit post in r/analytics I linked to, which doesn't have a ton of info but gives more than what the author had. Though you're correct, it was posted after the author originally posted, and I can't fault him/her for not checking in again a few days later.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#30

Post by lolc »

vntok wrote: post #9
lolc wrote: post #5

So they're modifying URL? Facebook is breaking things. But sure, they've run the numbers and decided they don't care. Browsers will now have to resort to removing query parameters to prevent tracking. And websites should really use click-to-enable sharing buttons to prevent Facebook from snooping on everything.

My guesstimate is that the number of URLs that are shared on Facebook AND that already have a completely orthogonal "fbclid" parameter is infinitesimal. Maybe among the URLs shared on Facebook there are a few whose servers only respond to a fixed amount of parameters, changing their behaviour when additional unused parameters are appended to the query string, but I imagine that the number of such cases is so low it's…

It breaks some server-side caches. And the article itself notes that pages were indexed by Google with the "fbclid" parameter attached.

I don't get the part about async requests. What's the scenario?

Post reply on HN