Shortcut Link and Referral domain in Google Analytics

[JonsonSwartz]

Hello,

One of my clients has a Facebook page for his company, and his social media manager posts some promotional and educational posts on daily basis. the social media manager uses affiliate ID's in the destination URL to track traffic and leads that come from the social media and to make it look nicer he uses shortcut links service - bitly.

Now I have a few questions about this:

• I don't see traffic comes from bit.ly or bitly.com in Google Analytics, my question: is using 301 redirect makes Google Analytics understand that the last website which sent the traffic to my website is not the actual Referral website?

• Is using shortcut links in the social media damages the links value (even though they are <nofollow>links - but still considered as signals from social media</nofollow>

Thanks.

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[S_Curtis]

On the BItly examples I've seen although the link says bitly.com the referring has a domain of t.co. Have you looked to see if there are any from t.co?

[FedeEinhorn]

You don't see traffic from bit.ly as they actually redirect the user without serving any content, therefore is just a redirection, instead, you should see the actual referrer, facebook, or whatever. However, if you are getting the hit from a facebook page, it is probably an HTTPS page, and therefore, if redirected to a non-SSL page referrer information isn't passed along. However, you could see something like facebook.com/u.php?.... You should use Analytics tracking variables to better understand from which posts are those visitors coming: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

As for your second question, just like you can interpret the redirection, so can Google or whatever search engine scrapes the page looking for signals. It won't matter if you pass them through bit.ly or services alike, the link ends up in your site (as long as there's a 300 redirection in place, which it is in bit.ly).

Hope that helps!