This afternoon I was checking the analytics for one of my websites and noticed a strange URL which someone attempted to view on my site: https://cybersurf.io/?fbclid=IwAR15ndwImeZd0W7tUqLSa80LrSy1SJDQGZr6Ch92eAfbCIYo7WkDNISN4no

I don’t know exactly what the above gobbledygook means. Originally I thought “fbclid” might be shorthand for Facebook Client ID. This was my working hypothesis that maybe this was some sort-of new hacker exploit involving login with Facebook.

But a quick google search for ?fbclid= revealed that this actually stands for Facebook Click Identifier. I’m sort of a suspicious person, so my next thought jumped to: Is this some kind of new click fraud scheme?

However, now I think I have this mystery figured out: someone shared a link to my website on Facebook! Ding ding ding, we have a winner! So if you find yourself puzzled trying to figure out some strange traffic coming to yourself website with ?fbclid= in the URL, it’s probably a visitor coming to your site via Facebook.