Split Testing with query strings doesn't work with Facebook Sharing

  • Resolved cvanderlinden

    (@cvanderlinden)


    10 years, 1 month ago

    The Simple Page Tester plugin has been great so far, but I have come across and issue.

    Let’s say I have two URL used for split testing:

    example.com/master
    example.com/variation

    If use the Facebook sharing debugger with those URLs, it will be able to scape the proper information. However, if I append a query string, such as:

    example.com/master?utm_source=email
    example.com/variation?utm_source=email

    Facebook will throw an error: Error parsing input URL, no data was cached, or no data was scraped.

    And if I “See exactly what our scraper sees for your URL” It says this: Document returned no data

    If I turn off the split testing, the urls will scrape properly with query strings and load all the proper meta tags. How can I use the some page tester plug, with a query string, without it breaking Facebook sharing?

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-page-tester/

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author Josh Kohlbach

    (@jkohlbach)

    10 years, 1 month ago

    Hi cvanderlinden,

    When it comes to sharing links, I highly recommend only sharing the master page.

    Otherwise you’ll need to put in a 301 redirect later when you kill off the variation after the test is finished.

    As far as the query strings and facebook. I’m not sure how this would change based on the split test, but it seems that facebook doesn’t want to handle the 301 redirect when query strings are involved.

    Could you try setting it to only show the same variation to the same person? This would stop the redirect once they’ve seen it once and might get it working.

    Other than that, I’m not sure there’s much I can do as this is on facebook’s end and we have very little control because we need to ensure query strings are passed on to the appropriate variation after redirect.

    Cheers,
    Josh

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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