Whilst reviewing traffic sources on Google Analytics last month we discovered a new source of referral traffic called l.facebook.com which had never been displayed before and yet had managed to receive a significant number of sessions. We were intrigued to find out what this was so that we could ease confusion amongst fellow Google Analytics users.
We trawled through a countless number of web pages to try and discover what this could possibly mean but it seemed that everyone was in the same situation and utterly clueless as to what it could be. Further investigation lead us to what appeared to be a new addition to the family of Facebook sources which currently includes facebook.com (standard) and m.facebook.com (mobile).
So what is this new source of referral traffic?
The l.facebook.com is a form of traffic that has been redirected through Facebook through what is known as a link shim. A link shim is a tool that was created by Facebook in 2008 and protects Facebook users from malicious URLs.
Essentially, people who have vanity URLs for their personal Facebook profile often end up unintentionally releasing personal information. A vanity URL is when a URL displays a unique URL that is specifically related to your company name, brand or person i.e. facebook/companyname as opposed to facebook/hfg?iu90835khgssiref=ts.
Rather than Facebook releasing personal information on their subscribers they have enforced this new traffic code which provides the user with anonymity. In addition to giving visitors anonymity, it gives the site that they are about to visit the ability to record the traffic as if from Facebook, where as in the past it would have simply showed as general direct traffic on Google Analytics.
There is another source of referral traffic within the Facebook family called lm.facebook.com which is of the same nature as l.facebook.com but highlights whether the traffic is sourced from a mobile device with the use of the letter "m".
In addition to this there are also the referrals 'm.facebook.com' and 'facebook.com'. These simply refer to traffic directly from the facebook mobile app and the facebook website respectively.
We will be continuing to keep our eyes peeled for any more digital updates and progressions within the industry. But for now, we hope this clarifies the l.facebook.com mystery!
'Facebook Flower' by mkhmarketing available at StartBloggingOnline.com under a Creative Commons attribution 2.0. Full terms at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
