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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T19:43:16+00:00

Have you noticed that almost every links in facebook have ref query string? I

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Have you noticed that almost every links in facebook have ref query string?

I belive that, with that ref, facebook somehow track and study their user behaviour. this could be their secret recipe of making a better usability.

So, I am trying out the same thing, change http://a.com/b.aspx
to
http://a.com/b.aspx?ref=c and log every hits into a table.

========================================================================
userid | page          | ref       | response_time | dtmTime
========================================================================
54321  | profile.aspx  | birthday  | 123           | 2009-12-23 11:05:00
12345  | compose.aspx  | search    | 456           | 2009-12-23 11:05:02
54321  | payment.aspx  | gift      | 234           | 2009-12-23 11:05:01
12345  | chat.aspx     | search    | 567           | 2009-12-23 11:05:03
.....  | ............  | ........  | ...           | ...................

I think it’s a good start. I just don’t know what to do with these informations.
Is there any appropriate methodology to process these informations?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Here’s a second answer as the former was only about response time statistics.

    The ref query string allows to identify the sources, especially of people entering a Conversion funnel. So you might make statements like “N $ of revenue come from users clicking link X on page Y”. Now you could try to modify link X to X1 and see if it increases revenue from this page. That would be your first step into A/B Testing and Multivariate Analysis. Google Website Optimizer is a tool exactly for this purpose.

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