In an article recently published here on Performance Marketing Insider, which can be found HERE, it was reported that Facebook is going to be having virtually all of their traffic run over secure, HTTPS, connections. The downside of this change was that when traffic travels from a secure HTTPS page to a traditional HTTP page, the referral tags which allow site owners and marketers to see where traffic to their page came from is removed.
This caused significant concern for marketers due to the fact that Facebook is such a popular site which links to millions of other pages. It seems Facebook has heard these concerns and is putting in place a way to allow their users to enjoy the benefits of secured browsing while still providing this valuable information to marketers.
Facebook said the following, which should help marketers retain the valuable referrer information:
Browsers traditionally omit the referrer when navigating from https to http. When you click on an external link, we’d like the destination site to know you came from Facebook while not learning your user id or other sensitive information. On most browsers, we redirect through an http page to accomplish this, but on Google Chrome we can skip this redirect by using their meta referrer feature.
This is certainly good news for both marketers and Facebook users alike. It is always nice to see these types of solutions which meet the needs of everyone involved.
