What are Facebook-visits registered under "Search Engines"

General questions
1

Hi everybody,
I worked with Matomo for quite some time now and today I encountered something interesting.
If I check the channel “Search Engines” under acquisitions, there is quite a large amount of visits that seems to be coming from Facebook - yet it is somehow registered under “Search Engines”.

I know the difference between Facebook-visits registered under “Campaigns” and “Social Networks” but this is new to me.

In what way exactly are people coming from Facebook to the landing page to be registered under “Search Engines”?

I’m interested in all answers and look forward to be using the forum in the future, this is my first post :slight_smile:

Best,
J

2

@innocraft, do you have an idea?

3

Confirming:

FB referrals are appearing in the
Acquisitions > SearchEngines panel?

4

Yes, thats whats happening:

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It is in german but I think you get the idea. In the submenu (after pressing “+”) it just says “Query not defined”.

5

I am not a user of Facebook.
Is there no search bar on FB that could lead to your website?

6

I do not think so, at least I do not see anything like this on Facebook. I will try different stuff on Facebook and see how it pops up in Matomo, maybe I will be able to replicate the phenomenon.

7

Hi @Johannes_Heinemann can you please hover over ‘Facebook’ in the list and open segmented visits log, by clicking the icon. So we can understand which visit is added under this for further information. Can you please share this information with us.

8

So this is the visits log:

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similar IPs, entering the same pages, only for a very short time.
I found the following article and developed a suspicion:

Is it possible that these links have been organically posted on Facebook and Facebook is now crawling them?

12

Facebook appears on the list used for search engine detection
github[dot]com/matomo-org/searchengine-and-social-list/blob/0fac712ebae23fdfcfcb0acad2cb3735ec80ad9b/SearchEngines.yml#L729
Don’t ask me why…
That seems to be a reason.