Exclude Facebook fbclid from Google Analytics

19/05/2020

This is a very short and simple article that covers just one topic - how to exclude the fbclid query string from Google Analytics reports.

Facebook adds a query string to all URLs which has a unique ID called fbclid. If Google Analytics is not configured to exclude this query string, then it will appear as if there are multiple versions of the same URL in your All Pages and Landing Pages reports. This was first spotted in October 2018 and I still see Google Analytics properties where the fbclid query string is not excluded. If you drive a lot of traffic from Facebook to your website, you really need to exclude fbclid, otherwise your page reports will look like this

This extract is from our own Google Analytics before we added an exclusion. As you can see, the page is the same in each case, only the fblcid is different.

Excluding the query string is easy. Go to ADMIN and go to the View that you wish to block fbclid for - typically your main view of your data. Click on View Settings. Add fbclid into the Exclude URL Query Parameters field as shown.

If you have other query parameters you want to exclude, add them all to the same field separated by commas - don't leave any spaces between query name and comma.

And that is all you have to do. Now when you look at the page views of your popular pages you can have more confidence that the total is accurate.

Written by Nick Baker