Digital Content Marketing Blog

l.facebook.com is a referred click from a link that has been shared on Facebook.

The best way to describe how the l.facebook.com referral shows up in Google Analytics is to think about when you post or share on Facebook. If you were to write a Facebook post that included a link to your website, shared it to your feed and someone clicked on that link, the click and resulting traffic to your website can result in the l.facebook.com source to show up in your Google Analytics account. The same thing can happen if you write and publish a post, but then a connection shares your post and someone else clicks on the link, the same thing can occur whereas l.facebook.com (technically in this scenario lm.facebook.com) will show up in your reporting.

This can also happen on both Mobile and Desktop versions of Facebook, so in the app, on a mobile site or a full desktop experience.

Mobile and App m.facebook.com and lm.facebook.com

Something that websites used to do in the past for SEO and for user experience was to create a mobile only version of the website and most of them would use the subdomain of m. to represent mobile. Today many sites will use responsive design so they don’t need a separate site to maintain for mobile. But Facebook uses m.facebook.com for their mobile site. When a link gets clicked  here them you will most likely see the lm.facebook.com referral source in your Google Analytics account.

What is the Difference Between Facebook.com and l.facebook.com?

There really is no difference. These are simply different ways that Facebook has sections of their website and service operating on different servers, tracking link clicks and attributing behavior to their own systems.

l.facebook.com vs lm.facebook.com vs m.facebook.com vs web.facebook.com vs business.facebook.com

Again these are all basically the same with the exception of the business.facebook.com subdomain. That one is specific to the Meta Business Suite product that can be used to better manage a Facebook Page, users, permissions, ads, apps, etc.

Here is a short list of a number of referral sources related to Facebook that you’ll find in Google Analytics

• Facebook.com
• m.facebook.com
• l.facebook.com
• lm.facebook.com
• web.facebook.com
• our.intern.facebook.com
• business.facebook.com

If you have more questions about these Facebook referral sources showing up in your analytics platform, then definitely reach out!

If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Leads or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422

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If you are currently using Google Analytics and have logged into the platform with the last 9 months then you are likely aware that as of July 1, 2023 Google Analytics UA or GA 3 as some call it will be “Sunsetted”. Essentially Google is going to stop tracking much of the critical data it collects currently in Google Analytics UA in a move to force everyone to start using the new Google Analytics 4 or GA 4 platform. So naturally you’ll want to ensure that you have GA 4 set up for your website.

As a part of that set up you will want to ensure you have events being tracked that you can measure and some of them will be used as conversions / goals just like you do in Google Analytics today.

You can either create those manually or you have the option of migrating the Google Analytics events from with UA over to GA 4 using a migration tool. But this is why we decided to create this blog. It doesn’t always work!

What Problems Will You Experience Migrating Google Analytics UA Events over to GA 4?

You are most likely going to run into issues when using the events migration tool inside of Google Analytics. When using the tool you’ll even get messages telling you that some event types can’t be migrated because they aren’t compatible. One of those are events / goals that utilize regular expressions (many of our do, so we were screwed on that one).

But what we found is that very few of the events we migrated over to GA 4 actually worked. The migration itself would be successful in that there were events which appeared inside of the GA 4 property, but they would never work. No data would track and they were essentially worthless.

So we had to go back and create all of those manually. Some of them we could create within the GA 4 platform alone and other we had to build out using a combination of both GA 4 and Tag Manager (such as Click to Call phone number clicks tracked as an event and conversion).

Something different about events inside of Google Analytics 4 is that you have to “Toggle” events to be marked as conversions. Which is nice because you can more cleanly have a bunch of events being tracked while quickly marking which of them actually count as a conversion for your organization.

We just wanted to give you a heads up if you are going down this journey and to let you know that you’re not crazy if you run into problems like this. Because you will!

If you need help setting up or migrating Google Analytics over to GA 4 then contact us and we can easily help you out with that.

If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Leads or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422

Or Submit your information below

We get this question fairly often, “What is the difference between CPA and CPC?” or “Which is Better, CPA or CPC?”. There really isn’t a good answer to which is better because they are different and would be better in specific situations.

But sharing with you the difference between CPA and CPC is much easier and helpful for those in search of answers. In this article we’ll go deep into the CPC vs CPA question.

So however you think about it…

CPA vs CPC ( Cost Per Acquisition vs Cost Per Conversion )

CPC vs CPA ( Cost Per Conversion vs Cost Per Acquisition )

PPC vs CPA ( Pay Per Click vs Acquisition )

** You’ve also got Cost Per Action and Cost Per Click that can fall under the CPA and CPC banner

We’ve got a breakdown on this below which should be very helpful.

What is CPA (Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition)?

CPA stands for Cost Per Action.

Some will argue that CPC stands for Cost Per Acquisition and others consider it to be Cost Per Conversion. But if we’re being technical, an acquisition and a conversion are both actions so we like to stick with CPA meaning Cost Per Action.

In the earlier days of digital advertising there were times when platforms wouldn’t charge you unless a specific action was taken that you defined or chose from in the system. But as the ad platforms advanced the CPA model became more broad in what actions taken counted towards the payout.

Each platform has its own unique set of actions that are tracked and paid for such as Facebook, Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads. Some of the actions are clicks, shares, comments, and on page conversions.

The great thing about the CPA model is that you can set a CPA goal for the platform to optimize against. For example I could set a target CPA of $35 and the ad platform will serve specific prospects under the best circumstances to generate that $35 or lower CPA. The details on how these ad platforms do that is complex and not 100% known as to how they do their optimization.

Google for example will require you to have a certain number of conversions before you can take full advantage of the CPA model.

What is CPC (Cost per Click)?

CPC stands for Cost Per Click in the world of advertising. 

Many people think of CPC in relation to Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) as they were the platform that really brought this ad payment model to popularity.

The Cost Per Click Model (CPC) was created so that advertisers only get billed when a prospect clicks on your ad. This was looked at very favorably in the advertising community because it ensured that a prospect saw the ad, read it and that they felt it was relevant enough to click on to then learn more.

In many instances marketers sometimes refer to the CPC model as PPC or Pay-per-Click. The unfortunate truth is that there are so many acronyms in the digital marketing space that you’ll find a lot of overlap and conflicting opinions or beliefs as to what some things mean. But hey that comes with the territory in every industry, am I right!

CPC or PPC is essentially the opposite of the CPM model or Cost Per Thousand (the M stands for 1,000 based on the Roman Numeral M). Using that model an advertiser would pay a specific amount of money for every 1,000 impressions. This came from older advertising mediums such as newspapers, radio, billboards and television when the estimated circulation, listenership, car traffic and viewership were estimated and advertisers would pay based on those “impressions”.

One of the most significant benefits to CPC advertising is being able to predict traffic. By paying for the click you can allocate a budget that will generate an expected number of visitors to your website. Digital marketers love this predictability for planning and forecasting.

Something very unique to CPC bids in the Google Ads keyword triggered ads environment is that the more competitive a term is the more that click will cost you in most cases. This dynamic pricing is controlled by a number of factors that we won’t go into fully here, but it may be worth your time to look into it even more.

Most major ad platforms give you an option to utilize a cost per click model including Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads and more.

So What is the Difference Between CPC and CPA?

While we’ve explained the details about CPC or Cost Per Click and CPA or Cost Per Action / Cost Per Acquisition we can now simplify this into an easy to understand difference between CPA and CPC.

CPC is paying for the click

CPA is paying for the action

It really is that simple. We don’t want to be too underwhelming with this, but the main difference between CPC and CPA is paying for the click vs paying for the action / acquisition.

In reality there are quite a few nuances to these bidding models and other elements that will affect the cost and the conversion potential. But those differences are much more in-depth and require a much more intensive training and explanation which you can find a lot of online for free.

If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Leads or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422

Or Submit your information below