One of the Google Analytics properties I manage tracks multiple subdomains.
Subdomains are tracked through views created in this property using filters to include only traffic for the subdomain.
I've noticed that these subdomain views do not include data on source/medium coming through other subdomains on the same property.
Can views under the same property track source/medium session coming in from views under same property?
You probably have a.example.com and b.example.com in the Referral Exclusion List at the property level, so those referrals will be swapped to Direct.
This is normal behavior to avoid interrupting sessions on the same domain.
You can get more information here:
https://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2016/08/11/subdomain-tracking-google-analytics/
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I have a site with 3 subdomains with the same Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics tracking ID. I created 3 views on the property, I applied the proper inclusion filters so I can focus each view on its counterpart subdomain.
GTM is firing GA on the three subdomains and the GA debugger is showing that it is tracking (I tried recording and it worked, I tried GA plugin and there are no errors).
The problem: One of the subdomains is reporting everything (all subdomains)! Even with the proper inclusion filter in place. The 2 other subdomains are reporting nothing.
Note that my inclusion filter is equal sub1.example.com (and the same view is reporting on sub2.example.com and sub3.example.com)
I spent 6 hours so far, reading documentation and trying different options to no avail.
Why would be a filtered view for one subdomain show stats for the other subdomains? Why would the other subdomains show nothing? Would this be related somehow to GTM?
GTM id is the same across the domains and not duplicated and matches the account number
GA snippet is not included on the pages and the id is double checked
The three subdomain settings are exactly the same with only the inclusion filter being different
Make sure that you disable UserId Tracking when you create a View.
Enabling UserId Tracking will exclude all analytics without it being set.
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.
I have a web site which has many microsites.
I want to use Google Analytics to track the traffic of each individual Microsite as opposed to tracking traffic of the whole site?
I have looked at Google Tag Manager, but I am not sure if this is the right solution - how can this be done?
Thanks
There's two basic ways in which this can be done:
If you don't care about inter-microsite traffic, you can just create a different GA property for every microsite and use Google Tag Manager to create your GA tracking tag with the right property ID depending on the hostname (using a lookup table variable, for example).
If you want to be able to see traffic flow between your microsites (i.e. not have a visitor navigating from one site to another show up as a referral but as the same session), then you should use the same GA property for all sites and set up cross domain tracking. Then inside your GA property, you can set up different views based on the hostname dimension of the hits.
I have set up Cross Domain Tracking for two different domains with two different GTM containers. I added both domains, a.com and b.com in the Auto Link Domains in both Universal Analytics tags, set Allow Linker for both to true and set Cookie Domain to auto. However, when I'm surfing from Facebook to website a.com and click through to b.com I see a.com / referral as a traffic source in the real-time reports in Google Analytics. This should be Facebook in this case right? Does someone have a method to debug this issue?
Thanks!
Use Referral Exclusion List in Property Tracking info. This will exclude traffic from a.com from referrals.
Possibly you are not a Google Analytics Premium member?
The second thought is maybe you are using two Google Analytics properties (one for each domain) and not using one property for both domains?
To be able to utilize the cross domain function you must have one Google Analytics property associated to all domains. You might have the results of funny "referral sources" because you are using two different properties (UA-1111111-1 and UA-2222222-2.
Read more about multiple cross domains
Or for specific cross domain info (notice the part about "UA PROPERTIES)
Let me know if that is the issue, and what your next strategy might be.
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).