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I am trying to track click of an articles.

Setup:

  • Adding amp enabled wordpress article on facebook.
  • This article is wrapped inside url shortner.

Issue:

  • Clicks discrepancy is the only & biggest issue.

  • This discrepancy is 10 times. So fb is showing some 300 clicks where shortner & server logs are showing 2.5-3k clicks.

  • I thought its something to do with shortner so tried using different shortners like goo.gl, po.st. Also did code my own using Yourls(php).

  • I did tried checking referrers with my own url system & all the reference seems to be valid fb clicks.

Now I need some solution to solve this issue. I need to know how can I reduce this discrepancy.I think its something to do with AMP/FB Instant articles.

Vadim Kotov
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CaptanU
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  • What happens without any URL shorteners? Same issue? – CBroe Feb 27 '17 at 16:10
  • Facebook does some quite aggressive pre-loading on mobile devices - so you might see a lot more requests than translate to a user that _actually_ read the article. http://inchoo.net/dev-talk/magento-website-hammering-facebook-liger/ – CBroe Feb 27 '17 at 16:12
  • @CBroe, yes. same issue. Without shortner also there are two scenarios. 1> AMP urls 2> Non amp. Forget AMP enabled urls but non amp urls without shortner are having this issue. – CaptanU Feb 28 '17 at 06:56
  • @CBroe, really very thanks for the link. I tried checking X-Purpose headers, x-fb-http-engine but I am not able to get it. Used getallheaders() & $_SERVER variables. But I have found something, answer is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9773954/why-facebook-is-flooding-my-site Fb is using facebookexternalhit/1.1 as useragent for preview requests. – CaptanU Feb 28 '17 at 14:50

1 Answers1

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I kinda found answer to this. So, GA sessions are sessions, which means if some user visits any site multiple times still it will be counted once only. But url shortner works on clicks, once you click on any url its counted. So there can be 10 or even 20 clicks under single session.

Closest solution I can find this this issue is to setup a cookie & not to record user's click if he is visiting again in certain time frame. I am still testing this functionality but looks like its working decently.

CaptanU
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