Help…
Something has happened with facebook and I’m looking for some feedback from other website owners.
The Background
I maintain several web sites and connect them to a number of social media sites. I’ve been using IFTTT for years to add autoposts to a number of social media pages. This particular travel site is my hobby and and while I started it to chronicle our world travels. It’s grown into something more. We also have several online stores (TheCraftsMart.com) that have changed hosts and styles over the years but use the same IFTTT process for auto posting to our social media sites.
What’s Happened
About a month ago I began to record an increase in traffic visiting several of my sites from my facebook pages. At first I was pleased at what was happening but one afternoon I spent time reviewing one stores facebook page. I simply scrolled down the page looking at postings and making notes but never clicked on a single post. I never clicked anywhere on that facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/WinterGardenCrafts). Later that day I checked the stores traffic and was shocked that there were 44 inbound links from the stores facebook page, and that was unusual for a day when I hadn’t added a post to the facebook page. In fact it was similar to holiday traffic when I was advertising with facebook??
I used the same process with my travel site and its facebook page – same result. I managed to chat online with a facebook representative who was very convincing that I had to be mistaken. As an additional check I repeated the process with a page and website dedicated to my odd musings (https://earlynotions.wordpress.com/). I did that three days in a row with the same results.
If my experience isn’t unique than facebook is falsely ginning up its click traffic and its data cannot be trusted.
On the positive side I can use this approach to inflate my traffic (does Google etc. even track all this sort of traffic??
I would really like to know if anyone else is seeing this – add comments below please.
intend2travel.info 