In the case of the OP, it's possible that the URL itself is being used to populate fields in the corresponding page.
URL's can have all sorts of additional - and generally non-critical - bits added to them. As a general principle URL's contain the following:
- Domain - ex https://subdomain.site.com - coarsely where the site is located on the internet
- Path - ex /pages/content/page.html - finely where the resource is located on the server
- Parameters - ex ?pageid=123456789&browser=desktop&len=en - granularly make calls within the resource to populate the page or make calls to other sites/resources
There are innumerous server schemes and site frameworks on how parameters are determined - i.e. sometimes they're seemingly built into the
path.
Let's take a well-known e-commerce site whose domain will be replaced with
rainforest.com :
https://rainforest.com/Energizer-Lithium-Batteries-Ultimate-Battery/dp/B01C4PP8FK/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=energizer+lithium+aa&qid=1598109667&sr=8-4
Built into that URL is a bunch of tracking information that they likely use for analytics and possibly for dynamic page content generation. The astute will notice that the search terms used to locate the product are encoded into the URL:
&keywords=energizer+lithium+aa
Knowing a bit about how rainforest.com structures their URLs, one can strip this down to the absolute minimum...
https://rainforest.com/Energizer-Lithium-Batteries-Ultimate-Battery/dp/B01C4PP8FK/
... will also load up the same product page. In my case doing a stare-and-compare there doesn't appear to be a difference in the dynamic content (i.e. "other shoppers also bought" and "related products") but I'm also logged into the site thus rainforest.com has far better details on how to pitch to me.
Let's take something that ZuckBook likes to spam my feed with:
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g28249372/best-vehicles-apocalypse-2019/?utm_source=facebook_dda&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=dda_fb_cd_d_i_g28249372&fbclid=IwAR0USpu-B1urcfokFRvopDDZB36q85lfUDrcOQMpY6-m_4g-D81sT3skCVo
... which can also be reduced to ...
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g28249372/best-vehicles-apocalypse-2019/
ZuckBook along with C&D do us the favor of making their parameters mostly human readable:
- ? : Generally used to indicate parameters rather than file path information
- & : Used to join parameters to one another
- utm_source=facebook_dda : Zuckbook link
- utm_medium=cpm : Medium "cpm", whatever that means
- utm_campaign=dda_fb_cd_d_i_g28249372 : Likely an identifier for the ad campaign itself, i.e. the article ID on ZuckBook as part of an ad buy or maybe ZuckBook paying C&D to provide content
- fbclid=IwAR0USpu-B1urcfokFRvopDDZB36q85lfUDrcOQMpY6-m_4g-D81sT3skCVo : It's possible that my entire life history as ZuckBook understands it is neatly encoded within this string, but the most likely just identifies the impression uniquely a number of ways ... including some means of identifying me and might also be used as proof of impression in whatever financial relationship exists between C&D and ZuckBook
As a general courtesy, I pull the extraneous parameters, campaign trackers, user trackers, and other potentially user-identifying info out of URLs before sharing them.
