Is it a good practice to serve a page from another domain using a full body iframe? What kind of penalties (performance, CORS, etc.) would it have?
I'm negotiating a partnership with another website, and one of the conditions is to serve my content from one of its subdomains in order to count the traffic as their own for third-party audience companies, like ComScore and Google Analytics.
So, in order to keep my domain and protect my brand, I was thinking of serving from my domain a full body iframe pointing to my partner subdomain, which will be pointing to my servers. With this configuration, users will see my address in the navigation bar, but all the traffic and content will be counted as my partner's. Is this considered a good practice?
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 been reading some google documentation on tracking via google analytics, but still hasn't have a clear understanding of what's happening, I will put this in plain english so that my query can help others as well.
Basically I have 2 sites: siteA.com (parent), and siteB.com (child)
I have created a widget on siteB.com, i.e. siteB.com/widget. Let's say in this case I embed siteB.com/widget on siteA.com (home page)
<iframe src="http://siteB.com/widget"></iframe>
And on siteB.com, I have the relevant google analytics installed. So my question is:
Will siteB.com google analytics be able to register siteA traffic? (one traffic to siteA.com equals to siteB.com/widget.)
Many thanks!
Short Answer : No, It is not as simple
For cross browser tracking:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite?csw=1#trackingIFrames
In a site where the transfer between domains is done by opening a new
window or by including content in an iFrame, you will need to to
use the _getLinkerUrl() method to transfer visitor and campaign
cookies from one domain to another. For example, suppose you include a
form in an iFrame that is hosted on www.my-example-iframecontent.com.
In order to transfer visitor information from the parent page that
hosts the iFrame on www.example-parent.com, you would use JavaScript
to load the iFrame and pass in the cookie information using the
_getLinkerURL() method.
There are different ways to setup and it all depends on your configuration. Therefore, I suggest that you setup some test profile and experiment with your settings.
We have a Universal Analytics implementation that has multiple trackers in use across different sections of a site. There is one 'global' tracker which resides on all pages of the site, and then a number of individual trackers on separate Web Properties which are for versions of the site in other languages, which are hosted in subdirectories. i.e.:
www.example.com - has global tracker
www.example.com/fr - has global and /fr trackers
www.example.com/es - has global and /es trackers
and so on...
Each of these /xx subdirectory trackers has its own _ga cookie on a separate path matching the language, so the tracker for .com/es has its cookies on the path '/es' for example.
So with that setup in place we were expecting to see valid self-referral traffic from visitors moving from one subdirectory to another, or from the .com root site into one of these language specific sites. However, we're only seeing these visitors as Direct traffic.
We have removed the root domain from the Referral Exclusion List in the tracking settings for each of these properties, but that doesn't appear to have affected anything at all.
We do want to see traffic moving these directories though, does anyone know how we can get these "legitimate" self-referrals appearing again, or does Universal Analytics cut them out by default? Would I be able to use filters (using the full referral URL field value) or channel groupings to swap this traffic into Referrals or is there another/better way?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! :-)
Cheers.
It may happen that those visitors have been already marked as direct traffic, so they are not taken as referrals. Your change may only affect to NEW visitors.
I would like to track visitors sent to a website from different QR-codes. The QR-codes are unfortunately not created with google url builder. The problem, as I understand it, is that these visitors will only show as direct traffic to the different pages to where the Qr-codes points. Is there any good way to segment this traffic from other direct traffic to the same pages?
You will either need to:
Create a unique (sub) domain like qr.example.com/whatever
Create a unique get request like example.com/whatever?from=qr
Assume that everyone visiting your site from a mobile, with no referrer header set scanned your QR.
That's about all you can do.
We have a dozen or so sites, as well as the occasional subdomains so:
example.com
example.co.uk
us.example.com
etc
We have been using separate GA codes for each site. This works fine, but it means that adding a new site means getting a new code and we can't tell overall stats (e.g. how many people have visited all sites etc). If we went the one code route and set up separate profiles for each domain/subdomain:
1) Should we use _setDomainName("none") or _setDomainName("www.example.com") and _setDomainName("www.example.co.uk") etc
2) Will each domain profile treat the other domains as separate (e.g. will we tell on example.co.uk how many people visited from example.com and completed goals etc)
3) Are there any disadvantages to this method.
This post from the Google Analytics blog details how to set up a GA account for each site, and an overall 'rollup' account which sits on top - this will let you give separate GA admin control for each site, where you can dig deep into each site's account, and show cross-site referrals, and the rollup will give overall numbers (but I don't think it's going to report on unique visitors across the collection of sites).
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/09/advanced-structure-your-account-with.html