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.
Related
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
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 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).
I have two websites, website A and website B, the website A is a hotsite that is linked to website B, where the sales happen.
We need to know how the user got the website A and turned into a customer in website B(it means he bought something), so we can mesure the good sources to invest.
as the developer, I have access to these two websites source-code and can implement any google-analytic tag on them.
Thanks,
Jonathan
Web browsers generally send a referrer header, which contains the URL of the page which linked to the current page.
You can access this in the HTTP requests made to site B, and track sessions differently when the first page load is referred by site A. You can also access a document.referrer property in JavaScript, and use it to manipulate your analytics.
The correct way to implement this in Google Analytics is to configure the trackers so that they work cross-domain.
This will allow you to see all the information about where the converting visits originally came from and their path to purchase.
If you don’t use cross-domain tracking or you have it improperly configured, you’ll end up with meaningless data that shows self-referrers in the visit reports and a lack of proper attribution towards your conversion points. As a visitor moves from your primary domain to the other, they will start a brand new session in Google Analytics.
...
If a visitor clicks an ad or performs and organic search and ends up viewing a page on the www.3rdpartycheckout.com after viewing pages on www.primarydomain.com, you lose ALL data about how that user arrived and the complete picture of what they did. If they end up converting, you will only know that they came from www.primarydomain.com (which is not helpful at all).
http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2011/02/google-analytics-cross-domain-tracking/
Have the landing page on website B look at the referrer tag and if its website A then use a separate Google Analytics instance on website B for all sessions that were sourced from website A.