I have 4 domains all pointed to a single WP website and i want to know which domain is getting the most traffic. how can i segregate the traffic/domain in google analytics? FYI im using "monster insights" plugin for WP.
In short: A good solution would be to create a tracking URL for each of the 4 domains. Then, instead of pointing your domains to your "single website", you point each one of then to the created "tracking URL". That way you will be able to check the traffic coming as referrals in your google analytics reports.
Create your tracking url here
I recommend you use:
Website URL = http://single-website.com (Where all 4 domains are being redirected)
Campaign Source = website-name-1 (Change this name with the name of your 4 domains each time)
Campaign Medium = "Domains" (Or the name you prefer)
Campaign Name = "Redirect" (Or the name you prefer)
You can use the remaining fields, but I would only use these ones.
Result Example for domain 1:
http://single-website.com/?utm_source=website-number-1&utm_medium=domains&utm_campaign=redirect
Do the same for the remaining domains
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
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.
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).
So my issue is that I have multiple filtered subdomains in the same GA account with the proper "include only traffic to the hostname that contains subdomain.domain.com" filters. I even had a local digital marketing company Anvil Media help me set it up.
BUT there are keywords showing up in my subdomain traffic reports that are obviously sending traffic to the main domain and not the subdomain. I know because a quick google search will confirm that the keyword in question is brining up the main domain and not the subdomain.
The filters do seem to be filtering most of the traffic out, but not all of it.
Any ideas? I've been reading help articles for days . . .
Google search results are personalized. Person A may see the main domain and Person B could be seeing the sub-domain.
You should be able to confirm your filter is working correctly by doing a custom report using Page (dimension) and Pageviews (metric) and then filtering Page with "exclude Page containing SUB_DOMAIN_A." and seeing if you get any results. If you do get results your filter is wrong. If you don't then the filter is working, those keywords are bringing traffic to the sub-domain.
The landing page path dimension would be useful in determining which pages are causing the behavior you don't want.
I have my site.com and blog.mysite.com on a different IP address. Can I use the same Google analytics ID for both sites? Does Google analytics look at what IP address the recorded visitor information is from? If it doesn't, what prevents random sites from including your Google analytics tag and sending random data to your account?
You have to modify your script tag a little. Google's FAQs cover this:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55524
You can run any UA-XXXXX-YY on any website (any domain name, on any IP), it will end in your profile stats.
Yes, your stats could get completely messed up if some site would put your UA id on its site.
To prevent this, you can setup an include filter on your GA profiles, and Include only your domain names by using a regep like this "www.domain1.com|www.domain2.com|www.domain2.com" on the hostname field.
Be careful, the Include filter is exclusive (If you have 3 Include filters on the field hostname, only the first one will be applied).
The alternative is to create an advanced segment based on the hostname, you'll get mostly the same result but could be exposed to data sampling effects if you have a large audience. But it allows a quick fix afterwards, while filters need to be set before you get into trouble.
Sure. you can use the same for both. You will be able to segment traffic by domain name.