I have a site abc.com e.g. It has a UK and US variant with different content and based on country of access directs to abc.com/en-gb or abc.com/en-us.
Now in the site in the footer there is a link to our App-store website. Now that website too uses the same primary domain name of abc.com but at the proxy based on URL directs it to a completely separate installation of a stand-alone site which is abc.com/app-store.
Both the sites have different GA tracking code enabled. the abc.com corporate site has GA360 (Analytics pro) while the abc.com/app-store uses regular GA account. Basically no way the 2 are connected.
Now what I see is any traffic coming from abc.com/en-gb or abc.com/en-us to abc.com/app-store is being recognised as "Direct" traffic type in GA. While actually it is a "Referral" though they are both sites owned by us.
We need to somehow measure the traffic being sent to our app-store from our corporate site in the GA in the app-store for reporting purposes. We can track traffic sent from abc.com in the GA360 enabled on abc.com/en-gb and /en-us but then it is a different GA account and data store and needs manual sync up.
I had thought of using utm campaign source/medium - but that is giving false impression of bloated traffic as the UTM URL paramters remain even after landing on the destination site and for any filtering operation on the site it keeps reloading - giving the false impression of traffic coming from abc.com.
Any advice?
The reason abc.com/app-store GA account shows this in 'direct' because the referrer is the same domain. And Google will consider this as self-referrer.
GA doesn't care if you have 3 different GA set up in 3 different pages but the domain from which it is referred to, if it is different then it is fine else it considers it as 'direct'. Equivalent to user opening a bookmark.
How to solve this,
Use outbound event tracking on abc.com/en-gb & abc.com/en-us. But it will lead to manual merging of the data.
As UTM parameters are messing up your app store campaign data and filtering options, you can go with the ref parameter. I usually use it for tracking internal navigation. for example - abc.com/app-store?ref=main_site. You can easily filter out ref parameters from your view or create a segment. And it is considered different than the original URL, so no clashes.
Hope this helps
Related
The company's website has the first domain for the browsing and room selecting, when they click book now it takes them to the booking engine ( the second domain) and to bring the cookies over from one site to another should be enabled as we have setted up the cross domain perfectly. The problem here is that the cookies ARENT being transfered over since the second domain is blocking us out and we dont have access to the second domain. The client has only given us access to the first domain and cannot give us access to the second domain since it was made by a third party engine.
We have tried setting up cross domain using javescript manually and using the orginal ga wont work since it will be gone in july, we have have tried using an api (cross origin) and the cookies/ information counting it as a single user still will not transfer over. Keep in mind that the end goal is e-commerce tracking. We are currently trying to ethically hack into the website to give us access to the second domain to allow us through and enable us to properly set up the cross domain tracking, meanwhile do you guys have any help for this special case?
Is there a way to tell which sites my Google Analytics tracking code is implemented on? I am suspecting it may have been used with different micro landing pages with different domains and sub-domains. (Our developers were testing a cross domain tracking but did not went as expected)
I could not figure out where to see this on my GA reports, tried to search it but all ends up explaining referrals list which I am not looking for:(
You can check what Hostnames are sending data to the GA reports for a Property, via the Audience > Technology > Network report. Change the Primary Dimension from Service Provider to Hostname.
Filters are not retroactive, so you can instead create and apply a Segment based on Conditions to Filter Sessions Include based on Hostname that exactly matches yourdomain.com.
Doing this will allow you too also view the historical data in your reports in relation to valid Hostname
More info on building segments from the GA Help Center
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3124493?hl=en
We have two sites: site A and site B. We manage both.
Site A allows the user to prepare an order which then gets POSTed to site B via a form.
When looking at the GA statistics for site B, I want to be able to see the referral source to site A instead of seeing site A as the referral. How can this be achieved?
Is adding site A to the Referral Exclusion list of site B sufficient? Or do I need to do more than that?
If these are two different GA properties then adding to the referral exclusion list will simply mean that the referring domain appears as direct traffic.
To get the campaign info from the referring domain you would need to set up cross-domain tracking between the two domains.
As an alternative you could store the original traffic source e.g. in a cookie and append it via campaign parameters to all links that go to your other domain. However this would be a lot of work and quite error prone.
I have my UA setup across three sites www.aerserv.com, platform.aerserv.com, and support.aerserv.com. I want to be sure I'm tracking users across the domains properly so the analytics don't see each visit from one user as a "new user".
Is there a way to verify that I've setup my tracking correctly and Google isn't mis counting visitors?
Subdomain tracking is done out of the box in GA, and the only thing you need to make sure is that the cookie domain setting is set to 'auto', and that the referral exclusion list includes the main domain. Once you have those set, and if all pages across all applicable subdomains are tagged, then you should not have any issues. If you need to check, then you can look at the client ID (cid) for each pageview hit from one subdomain to the next. The client ID should be the same.
The set-up:
1 site, 2 domains: = mysite.com and mysite.co.uk
These 2 domains use DNS to point to the same site (IP).
There is 1 snippet of Google Tag Manager (GTM) code just after the opening <body> tag of the site (every page).
In the GTM container, I have added both domains on the "Container Settings" page.
There is one Google Analytics (GA) account which only contains the .co.uk domain. (An analytics account can only contain 1 domain.)
A tag has been set up in GTM with the type of Google Analytics and it has the UA code from the 1 GA account added.
A rule has been added to fire on all pages
Now, I don't care whether someone visits via .com or .co.uk, but I want to capture combined analytics for both. My questions is, with the way I've set things up using GTM, will GA save data for both domains ie mysite.com and mysite.co.uk, or do I need to set things up another way to achieve this? Ideally, I don't want to go down the forwarding route i.e. forward all traffic from .com to .co.uk.
First a bit of pedantry: Google Tag Manager cannot even collect informatiom from a single domain (it's not a tracking tool). And while you can only enter one domain in Google Analytics that domain setting serves no actual purpose; a Google Analytics account can track multiple domains in different "properties" (porperties are sections in an account that each have a unique id) or in a single property via cross domain tracking. Cross Domain tracking is used if you want to treat multiple domains as a single presence on the web (i.e. if you have a website and a shop with different domains, they still belong together).
Now, the way you have set things up data will be collected from both domains. There are at least two caveats:
1) If users can switch between domains inside a session (go from .com to .co.uk and back) their sessions will be interrupted and Google Analytics will register multiple visitors (that's because users are tracked via cookies which are domain specific). To avoid that you'd need to set up cross domain tracking (and how you would do that depends on if you are using Universal Analytics or asynchronous code. Look at your tracking code, if it contains a line that starts "ga("send"...." your are using analytics. If it contains lines that start with _gaq.push you use asynchronous code).
Cross domain tracking documentation for UNiversal Analytics (analytics.js)
Cross domain tracking for asynchronous code (ga.js)
2) By default Google Analytics tracks only the path, not the domain. If pages on both domains have the same path they will be displayed in aggregated form in the reports, that is if you have an index.php on both pages the visits for both will be added up. Maybe that's just fine with you, if they show the same content in any case. Else you'd either have to use "hostname" as a second dimension (which is not a sticky setting, you would need to re-apply that every time you switch to another report), or you create a filter on your view that includes the hostname in the reports.
Those caveats are relevant because data will show up in any case and will look perfectly okay even if it's not (even if you decide that those two things do not bother you you need to take them into account when you interpret the data).