If you’ve ever analyzed Facebook traffic in Google Analytics, you’re likely familiar with the situation where you see numerous referrals from different Facebook subdomains to your website.
This kind of data display makes analysis more complicated. It’s much easier to analyze when the data looks like this:
The situation is similar with other social networks.
A filter at the view or account level in Google Analytics can help fix this.
Setting up a filter to combine social media referral data
Create a filter with the following settings:
With this, we’ll find all sources that match the regular expression ^.*\.facebook.com$ and replace them with the familiar facebook.com. That’s the whole magic.
You can do the same for other social networks. For example, the filter setup for LinkedIn looks like this:
If you found this tip useful, don’t forget to check out other ones from the #Analytics Tips category:
- Improved timer trigger in Google Tag Manager: launching the timer based on tab activity time
- How to find the exact date of a user’s first visit to the website in GA4
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Web Analyst, Marketer