php - Tracking visitors coming from Facebook

Question

I have written a PHP based blog for the company i work for. Not using any frameworks. I am having trouble tracking users who come from my facebook page's posts to my blog (not wordpress).

I have created a shortlink url. Let's say it is sample.co and it redirects traffic to sample.com. Everything seems fine until here. The problem starts here.

I am adding all user's ip's, user agents. But if even i get 500 visits, my code adds somethig like 3.000 visits. Facebook stats and Analytics shows similar stats (~500 visits). I see that ip's added to MySQL are all different. It usually happens with Android users. I have read somewhere that Facebook sometimes renders to their users the actual URL when FB shows the post. I mean instead of the widget, Facebook shows the whole page. I am not quite sure about that to be honest.

To solve this problem, I have created and added an jquery script to my page and listened users' scroll event. It worked great. Not seeing too much traffic. But this time the problem is i am counting less users. Even I get 500 users from facebook and Analytics shows similar results, my script adds only 200-300 to MySQL.

Does anyone know a better way to track real traffic? Or do you aware of such problem?

Thanks

Answer 1

1. It should be filtered on the basis of user agent.

   https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler

   how to detect search engine bots with php?

2. Identifying users through IP is a good idea, but if your IP keeps changing, it's a good idea to use cookies.

   http://php.net/manual/en/function.uniqid.php

   If the cookie does not exist, you should see it as a new user.