I have several blogs and I now want to host them all under the same primary domain, but I'm trying to decide on using Sub-Domains vs Sub Folders.
Due to reading recent articles I'm thinking that subfolders would be the way to go, i.e. http://website.com/blog-1
My problem with this is how to track individual websites using Universal Google Analytics. I found this great article/video by Rick Maggio (http://www.webgumption.com/subdomain-tracking-with-google-universal-analytics/) showing how to track subdomains, but I was wondering if there was a way to do this for sub-directories.
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My company manages several websites for clients. We build Wordpress sites and manage them all on Flywheel. Whenever we make a new website, we typically duplicate an existing site so that we can reuse some general settings. I recently found out that the Google Site Kit plugin has been getting duplicated, along with its existing settings, so that multiple separate websites have been pointing to the same google analytics account. Because they are all pointing to the same account, the Google Analytics account is just tracking slugs, thinking all traffic is coming from the same base url. Now all traffic on common pages, such as Home, Contact, and About are being clumped together, highly inflating the numbers of what traffic would be on any one of the sites. Is there a way to separate the data by base url, so I could see accurate data for each site?
In that case what you'll need to do on the sites with the same property is revisit the Site Kit settings and connect to the correct Google Analytics property (and Tag Manager / AdSense if applicable).
Note also that if your site URL changes Site Kit does recognize this, asking users to connect once more on the new domain. If you then connect on the new site you'll need to change the connected Google Analytics property.
Going forward, before you duplicate a site that has Site Kit active you can disconnect the Google Analytics, AdSense and Tag Manager modules before duplicating, before connecting once more after copying. Alternatively you can reset Site Kit before duplicating. Resetting will mean you'll need to connect all services once more (after duplicating).
Hopefully the above helps.
I have a main website (e.g. mybrand.com ) with static pages mostly developed on Wix.com and I have a full application hosted on AWS on a sub-domain, e.g. app..com.
For tracking the traffic coming from different social media channels, we are building UTMs. My understanding is that the UTM tracking doesn't work when you hop between the sub-domains. Can you please suggest some clever options?
One option for us is to re-do the Wix website in WordPress and host WordPress ourselves on AWS next to our WebApp to completely avoid the domain hoping. But if we have a more elegant solution while keeping the Website, it would be preferred.
You can use a simple parameter in querystring (i.e. subdomain.com/page?from=domain1) then in Analytics count unique page with that parameter in the URL.
currently we have a company blog that runs via blog.domain.com. Also we have our corporate site (domain.com) that is our "selling" site. The blog is about tutorials, open source stuff, totally non profit.
We want to examine if the blog has value to our business. Branding and so on... Will customers visit our blog, are users from our blog more likely to buy sth and so on.
Both Domains are within the same Google Analytics Account but as separate properties. Is it somehow possible?
I dont want to use something with Referal as solution since it just might be that someone visits our blog and returns after some week via an ad.
You cant analyse Google Analytics data across properties or accounts. Data can only be analyzed within the same property.
This is why its best not to split data between properties but to store everything in the same property when its the same web account. At the very least having one default property with all of the data can also be useful.
I have forum directory on my website. That sub directory is located on http://www.mobilestore.pk/forum I was wondering that how can I track forum traffic only as a separate property in Google Analytics without filtering it from the whole traffic of the website. So I can show the trends of forum to Moderators or Editors.
I don't recommend using a property to break out traffic on the same domain. It's better to use a new view with a filter. Be sure to keep a view that is unfiltered.
If you do decide to use a separate property, you will need to modify the code in all the page templates used in the /forum path to use a different UA tracking ID.
You can add a 2nd tracker for just the forum.
As per Google:
"In some cases you might want to send data to multiple web properties from a single page. This is useful for sites that have multiple owners overseeing sections of a site; each owner could view their own web property."
This exactly fits your scenario
See https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/advanced#multipletrackers
I've gone through all the GA documentation and understand pretty well how to track across subdomains. I need to do something slightly different. My sites are moving from subdomains to subdirs onto one subdomain (www). From site1.domain.com to www.domain.com/site1, etc. Previously, there was nothing on www, only the subdomains, which all have their own tracking id, ie. 12345-2, 12345-3, etc. Both sites (old and new) will be live at the same time, so we need to aggregate and track across the subdomains (got that down, w/ all the filters needed) but also track/link only a specific directory on the www to each of the old subdomains. One kink is that while all the sites will map easily from site1.domain.com -> www.domain.com/site1, one special site - online.domain.com will map to www.domain.com/ with no subdir.
I figured I could solve the subdir issue by only placing the code for each property id on the respective subdir pages. I.e. site1=12345-2, and all the pages in /site1 get that code. For the online.domain.com site, the property-id specific code would have to be added to about 20 other subdirs, like /about/, /contact/, etc. Is this correct or kludgy? And i might even add new profiles that filter for subdir as a backup measure. But the issue I am having is this, I really want to track them as separate sites so that referral, time on site, etc metrics are specific to each subdir (site) and not shared across all the subdomains (which I think what subdomain cross tracking enables.) So I thought the solution was _setCookiePath, but can I use that on one subdomain (www) while cross-tracking and not the other? Because the old site won't have /site1/ as a valid path. Logically, is this something I even can do? Won't setting _setCookiePath on one side defeat the purpose of cross subdomain tracking?
I am confused about the usage of _setCookiePath when tracking subdirectories. When do you use setCookiePath and when do you just filter the data via subdir with profiles? The documentation says if you use _setCookiePath you need to disable tracking at the root level. What is the issue there? (I don't think this would work for me because I also need to track other top-level dirs like /about/). Also in another rollup account I want to track all the sites with one property id and then use filters to set up unique profiles for each subdir/site, eventually retiring the old method that uses multiple profile IDs. But I want to track my subdirs as separate sites with separate cookie info so that a referral to www.domain.com/site1 is not shared with www.domain.com/site2 - is this impossible with my requirements? More importantly, visits and uniques need to be segmented by subdir. A user that comes to /site1 then goes to /site2 needs to be a new visitor on /site2.
Update: did I totally overthink this? Since users probably wont be moving between old and new sites can I just add the same tracking property id to both sites w/o crossdomain tracking? That would help me consolidate old and new, but I still have the issue of how to track all the new subdir sites as different sites that don't share cookie info.
It sounds to me like you are moving from a more complex set up to a far simpler one.
If your new domain structure is:
www.site.com/one
www.site.com/two
www.site.com/three
www.site.com/four
Then the standard default Google Analytics code snippet will work. IE Without cross domain tracking, just select 'single domain' when setting up your new profile.
The only issue i can see is that current your data is stored in different profiles. Using this new setup all data will be stored in one single profile. However using the 'Page' metric you could create advanced segments to separate traffic visiting 'Pages' beginning with '/one' for example. Or you could create multiple filters with Page based filtering to separate the traffic from 'www.site.com/one' from 'www.site.com/two'.