How to Remove FBCLID From Your Analytics

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Cleaning Up Facebook Tracking Tags From Your Analytics

If you spend enough time in your analytics and you receive traffic from Facebook you will inevitably start seeing duplicate page results with a strange fbclid parameter attached. In this article you'll get a brief overview of what it is and then ultimately how to get rid of it and why you might want to.

If you haven't see it in action yet it looks a little something like this:

https://domain.com/page-path/?fbclid=JYGNyugnGiyn

What is the fbclid parameter?

The fbclid parameter is set by Facebook when somebody clicks through to your website from an advert on their platform. It is a feature that was introduced in late 2018, likely in response to emerging cookie policy updates and anti-tracking features in browsers. It almost certainly allows Facebook to more reliably collect click data on third party websites featuring the Facebook pixel by setting a unique URL for each visitor.

Unfortunately a side-affect of the unique URL structure is that your analytics package can think that hundreds or even thousands of your pageviews are for different pages even though the only difference is the tracking ID.

Luckily Google offers a simple feature for removing the fbclid and any other parameter from your analytics…

How to remove the fbclid parameter from Google Analytics

  1. Log in to Google Analytics.
  2. Go to the Admin section.
  3. Go to your View Settings.
  4. Add fbclid to the Exclude URL Query Parameters field.
  5. Hit Save

So there you have it, a super simple fix for this annoying quirk in your analytics. You can also use this same technique if any other parameters are messing up your analytics views.

TIP: Using Matomo Analytics instead?
Follow this guide to exclude query parameters with Matomo.

5 thoughts on “How to Remove FBCLID From Your Analytics”

  1. Marcus

    Thank you for this simply-to-follow post. I have a clarification question.

    Let’s say a page has 100 pageviews in analytics that are just domain.com/page. Let’s also say there are 50 more entries for that same page, but they each have a different FBCLID string. If I remove the FBCLID parameter, do those 50 pageviews no longer count (moving forward)? Or are those 50 pageviews currently being double-counted? Or something else? I’m just trying to understand exactly what is/will happen.

    Thank you in advance for your help in understanding this.

    1. Daniel McClure

      This disregards the parameters as a unique page identifier so in your example going forward you should receive 150 total page views in the same situation.

  2. Prasenjit

    Hi All,

    There is another way of removing the “fbclid” from the URL if you have the backend access. Just put these two lines in the .htaccess files:

    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)fbclid=.*($|&)
    RewriteRule . https://www.edukolkata.com%{REQUEST_URI}? [R=301,L]

    The good thing is that it will keep the URL clean. I have used this at my site and it works like a charm

    Thanks
    Prasenjit

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