Cleaning Up Facebook Tracking Tags From Your Analytics
If you spend enough time in your analytics and you receive traffic from Facebook you will inevitably start seeing duplicate page results with a strange fbclid parameter attached. In this article you’ll get a brief overview of what it is and then ultimately how to get rid of it and why you might want to.
If you haven’t see it in action yet it looks a little something like this:
https://domain.com/page-path/?fbclid=JYGNyugnGiyn
What is the fbclid parameter?
The fbclid parameter is set by Facebook when somebody clicks through to your website from an advert on their platform. It is a feature that was introduced in late 2018, likely in response to emerging cookie policy updates and anti-tracking features in browsers. It almost certainly allows Facebook to more reliably collect click data on third party websites featuring the Facebook pixel by setting a unique URL for each visitor.
Unfortunately a side-affect of the unique URL structure is that your analytics package can think that hundreds or even thousands of your pageviews are for different pages even though the only difference is the tracking ID.
Luckily Google offers a simple feature for removing the fbclid and any other parameter from your analytics…
How to remove the fbclid parameter from Google Analytics
- Log in to Google Analytics.
- Go to the Admin section.
- Go to your View Settings.
- Add
fbclidto the Exclude URL Query Parameters field. - Hit Save
So there you have it, a super simple fix for this annoying quirk in your analytics. You can also use this same technique if any other parameters are messing up your analytics views.
TIP: Using Matomo Analytics instead?
Follow this guide to exclude query parameters with Matomo.
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