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WARNING: Facebook Social Plugins Issue [Advanced Solutions]

Tuesday, 14 December 2010 @ 12:35, by Pearce Aurigemma

Important Note: This issue only affects people using the Facebook feature known as the Facebook Social Plugins. The issue is not caused by Omniture or Adobe code it is an inherent issue caused by the design of the Facebook Social Plugins.  These are not Omniture or Adobe plugins, so if you are not using these Facebook tools then you do not need to worry.

If your company is using Facebook social plug-ins you might have issues with your analytics data.  Depending on the plug-in, if you don’t take action to fix the issue then you will start to receive an artificial inflation of facebook referring traffic and an increase in pageviews.

Issue:

Some facebook social plug-ins redirect when a user interacts with the plug-in.  The redirect goes to facebook and quickly lands the user back onto your site.  The redirect does not pass the referrer through so your traffic sources report will show that the visit originated from facebook and overwrite the correct campaign or traffic source that brought the user to your site.  So your traffic sources reporting will be significantly erroneous.

Plug-ins that may be affected:

  • Activity Feed
  • Recommendations
  • Like Button

Fix:

We have a VISTA solution that will fix the issue for you.  If you are not familiar with VISTA solutions then all you need to know is the Adobe Engineering Services team will do all the work for you.  You do not need to change any implementation on your side.  We also have a JavaScript plug-in that will solve the problem as well.

How to get the VISTA solution:

You can go to the Adobe Engineering Services Solution Portal and request more information.  Once you do that we will get the request and respond back to you with the next steps within a few days.  You can also contact your Account Manager or any one of your contacts at Adobe and they should be able to point you in the right direction.

Other posts you might be interested in:

As always, post your comments or e-mail me at pearcea (at) adobe.com.  It is your comments and e-mails that keep me posting and give me ideas for future posts.

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  1. tom pitts 2010/12/14 @ 2:50 pm

    we were experiencing a similar (same?) issue with the FB like and ended up having to fix using javascript. details here: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=286466#p286466
  2. Pearce Aurigemma 2010/12/14 @ 3:47 pm

    Glad you got it fixed!
    I love hearing success stories.
  3. Keith MacD 2010/12/20 @ 3:34 pm

    We stumbled across this same problem trying to track FB share button clicks. onClick Custom Link tracking wasn’t working out of the box so ClientCare provided JS code to fix the problem:

    “What is happening here is that your Facebook JS call is hijacking the onclick event and replacing the link’s onclick with your own onclick function, which essentially overwrites the Omniture onclick code and causes it to never execute. There are a few ways to handle this collision, but you could also handle it on the base page by just appending our code to the Facebook onclick function after that function’s call.”

    This seemed to fix the basic link-tracking problem, but failed as soon as we tried to pass an s.prop in the same call. Still waiting to hear back from ClientCare with a solution to the prop problem.
  4. Andy 2011/1/13 @ 5:56 pm

    Keith MacD:

    In your reply you stated: “There are a few ways to handle this collision, but you could also handle it on the base page by just appending our code to the Facebook onclick function after that function’s call.”

    Could you shed some light on the few ways to handle this situation? Also, could you explain how to append your code the Facebook onclick funtion call?