fbclid: These six letters can ruin your Google Analytics data. I’m going to show you two quick ways to stop unique URLs with ?fbclid= from showing up in your Analytics and throwing off your pageview metrics.
The fix isn’t retroactive, so be sure to follow this guide and remove it ASAP!
What is fbclid and why does it show up in Google Analytics?
In 2018 Facebook started adding ‘fbclid’ as a URL parameter on outbound links. Basically, if you share content on Facebook and someone clicks it, Facebook adds a unique tracking string to the end of the URL. Why? So FB can track its users even more, of course!
What that means for your site, though, is that Google Analytics records each person as visiting a unique page on your site, when they are accessing the same content.
This makes it hard to quickly see which pages are receiving the most traffic, throws off your Google Analytics reports, and is just annoying. So, let’s remove the fbclid parameter from our Google Analytics.
How to remove fbclid from Google Analytics
Removing fbclid from your GA reports is pretty easy. Unfortunately, it isn’t retroactive, so your past data won’t be ‘clean’. So go ahead and log into Google Analytics to make the change right away.
Once logged in, click on the Gear Icon on the lower left side of the screen. This will take you to the Admin Settings page.
Next, make sure your website is selected, and then click View Settings at the top of the right column.
On the next screen, put fbclid in the box for Exclude URL Query Parameters and click save.
There you have it! Your data going forward will be cleaner and the reports you run from Google Analytics will be more accurate on the page level.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to remove fbclid from Google Analytics, it should be much easier to see the traffic on your website. This is a simple process and can easily be done in just a few minutes right inside of GA itself.
Go ahead and make the change – your future self will thank you!
