How to Track External Facebook Like button (4 posts)

Topic tags: Insights, like, tracking
  • Hi everyone!

    We recently added a Facebook like button to all products on our website (go here for an example: http://www.daedalusbooks.com/Products/Detail.asp?ProductID=96955&Media=Book)

    I’d like to track how many clicks we are getting, but don’t see anything on Facebook insights and my research isn’t turning up anything. Any ideas on what I can do to track external links from our company site to Facebook?

    Thank you!
    Amy

  • @daedalusamy

    Your like button on the page is set up to count the likes the page receives. When I “liked” the page the count showed up. But when I refreshed the page the count was gone. I went to my facebook page and your book did present in my timeline.

    You can use this tool to help you debug:http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug 

    Your page is throwing this error:The page failed to provide a valid list of administrators. It needs to specify the administrators using either a “fb:app_id” meta tag, or using a “fb:admins” meta tag to specify a comma-delimited list of Facebook users.

    I also checked your source code and checked the link url that your like count is being attributed to is

    data-href=”http://www.daedalusbooks.com/Products/Detail.asp?ProductID=96955&Media=Book&SubCategoryID=2146″

    As you can see the data-href url and the url of the page (link you shared above) is not the same url.

    AND if I navigate to http://www.daedalusbooks.com/Products/CategoryMain.asp?Media=Book&MajorCategoryID=8

    And click on the same book I get this link: 
    http://www.daedalusbooks.com/Products/Detail.asp?ProductID=96955&Media=Book&SubCategoryID=2146&ReturnUrl=%2FProducts%2FCategoryMain%2Easp%3FMedia%3DBook%26MajorCategoryID%3D8

    You really need to employ friendly urls. Facebook counts the number of likes based on url of the data-href. —You have multiple urls that go to the same product. 

    It looks like you are experiencing several issues. You definitely need to add  fb:app_id meta tag to your open graph meta data. This may solve your issues, but I think that your url structure is part of the problem. And creating friendly urls would also be beneficial for SEO (search engine optimization) reasons.

  • Thank you so much! Someone in our IT department set up the like button and she was having a lot of issues.

    I noticed that our Likes kept going up and down by 2 or 3 and I wondered what was going on, now this explains it.

    I will pass this along and get this problem fixed. I will also add the vanity URL to our page.

  • Theres 2 ways to count likes, but you need a programmer:

    1. Use the edge.create callback which allows you to “detect” when someone clicks the like

    2. Read your page from the graph, to get the total number of likes (easier)

    I know what I said above does not make sense, but it does to a programmer.


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