I have a Content Management System which let people create websites. the CMS has multiple theme and color schemes which they can choose. Every website created using this CMS has a unique domain (www.abc.com, ww.xyz.com etc).
Product In detail:
I have a website mywebsite.com people can signup there, buy their own domain and create their own website at mywebsite.com. so now they have their own xyz.com website where user can add content from mywebsite.com
All these websites are independent, they just share the same code as they all are using my CMS but they have their own content (pictures, videos, text)
I would like to track the statistics of all these websites all together. It is not a problem if a user goes to abc.com and then goes to xyz.com is counted as different session because they are totally different websites and I want google to count them separately.
I want to do this to check how much views my product is getting as whole. which is the best way to achieve this.
Thank you for your time.
What you're after here is what is referred to as a "roll up" account, this is as standard a feature available in Google Analytics Premium (or 360 as it's now known).
However assuming you don't have the financial resources to drop £100k on a Google Analytics premium account you can achieve similar through double tagging on the same website.
This is fairly straight forward and you can see Google's documentation on this on the link below:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/creating-trackers#specifying_fields_at_creation_time
As an example:
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto');
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Z', 'auto', 'rollupTracker');
ga('send', 'pageview');
ga('rollupTracker.send', 'pageview');
Where UA-XXXXX-Z is your property ID for the roll-up account and UA-XXXXX-Y is your users' default tracking code.
Note there are a few caveats to using roll-up views:
Even with cross domain tracking you could end up with more than one session across domains for the same user (if they landed on site A then separately landed on Site B before clicking back to site A)
You could hit the rate limits and sampling limits imposed by Google pretty quicky.
You'll need to use either View filters and/or advanced segments to see the statistics of separate websites and this will only exasperate the issue of sampling limitations.
Detail of the premium Analytics implementation is available over at Luna Metrics:
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/02/03/rollup-data-google-analytics/
This is a huge ask.
Google Analytics relies heavily on cookies, which are unique to the domain. This means that if Person A is on Site 1, and moves to site 2, your Google Analytics has no way of knowing that that was the same person; they will effectively become a new person every time the domain changes.
Now that's not a problem if you're going to have no links between the sites (although you may want to look into prepending hostnames http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/12/10/basic-google-analytics-filters/#Prepend Hostname to Request URI)
But if you're going to link the sites together then it gets a bit more complicated. You're going to have to set up cross-domain tracking (http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/06/16/cross-domain-tracking-with-google-tag-manager/) on each of these, which is best done using Google Tag Manager. Now depending on your implementation this could be a real headache for you, as this requires the GTM container for each site to have a list that names all of the other sites. This list would need to be updated on every container each time you add a site. However, you can make this significantly simpler if you just go for a straight-up Page View tag, and use the same container on each page.
Related
Our site is broken down into 4 main subfolders lets say www.site.com/a/, www.site.com/b/, www.site.com/c/ and www.site.com/d/.
Each of those subfolders has a different Google Analytics tracking account because we treat those subfolders as different divisions.
We want to be able to track clicks from www.site.com/a/mypage.html to www.site.com/b/yourpage.html.
Because they have different tracking codes the clicks between divisions don't carry over between GA accounts. So when the page www.site.com/b/yourpage.html has stats the referrer is {not set} and the previous page path is set to {entrance}, even though they should be www.site.com/a/mypage.html.
It was suggested, during the creation of our GA accounts to put our domain site.com in the Referral Exclusion List to avoid new sessions being created but I'm wondering if this is what is causing the clicks to not detect the previous page or referrer page, because we are excluding it.
Can anyone help me figure out how I am going to track these stats?
Is using cross domain tracking an option, even though we're not changing domains?
Any help on this will be a big help. TIA
The exclusion from the referral is certainly what makes the direct traffic result, however it is correct that it is set like this. The main problem is that track the same site by dividing the sections into 4 different Analytics Properties is not a good practice.
Cross-domain tracking will not work because they are different Properties (unless you have GA360).
However you can get what you need by using the UTMs parameters on the links, for example for a link from site A to site B you will have to write the URL of the link like this:
www.site.com/b/yourpage.html?utm_source=fromA&utm_medium=referral
In reports you will see these values in referral channel with the defined source instead of direct traffic.
I'm currently running an experiment without redirect, using Google Analytics, but I'm running in some issues.
The case
I work for a company that has two websites, with two separate brands, selling the same product. Today, we are plaining a merge of the brands, one of the reasons being the low costs of maintanance.
To see how this would affect sales, we are doing an a/b test. The test consists of changing the logo of the sites, and displaying an information about the merge of brands in the variant. The original is the website without changes.
We have some requirements to do it:
We use a CMS that has no support to the Google Analytics Experiment tag (we get some errors when we install it to the , and are unable to run it)
We need to run it through all pages of our websites. We have also a subdomain in each site, that the user is redirected to place an order.
We doesn't have time to wait for the experiment to end for itself. So, we came up with the idea to track the rejection and sales using a duplicate pageview with "/variant" in the url and in the title.
To do that, I used the Content Experiments without redirects, with the Google Tag Manager.
Configuration of the Experiment
In Google Tag Manager, I load the Content Experiment Javascript API and define the choosenVariation variable in all pages of both websites and subdirectories.
I track the "gtm.load" event, to see when the page finished loading all elements and change the DOM in three ways: changing the logo, adding the content about the merge and add an item to the main menu. All of this, through Javascript.
Along with the changes of the DOM, I add a datalayer called VirtualPageView, and pass the corresponding url with "/variant" and the title with "Variant".
When the datalayer fires, I send a new Pageview with the variant information.
The problem
The experiment is running right, but when a user gets the B variant of the experiment and procceed to a subdomain of our websites to place an order, it seems that it's somehow running another test, and happens to the user get the A variation.
We are trying to persist the original session and the client Id through the domain and subdomain, in order to the user that saw the different logo, continue in his way to order.
I saw this page about Running Experiments across Subdomains, but its about the Classic Analytics and the classic experiment, and we are using the Universal Analytics with the Content Experiment without redirects.
I don't know if my explanation was clear enough, so if someone have doubts, please ask me. I don't have a profound knowledge of Google Analytics or the Content Experiments either. So, if you have a better way to do this, please, tell me.
I came up with a solution to our problem. We agreed to use the experiment only in the pages of the main domain, so I can change the content otherwise in the pages of the subdomain:
When a user visits our main domain, through Google Tag Manager, I created a cookie that says what the result of the variation chosen for the user (0 for the original and 1 for the variation).
When this user goes to our subdomain to place an order, still via GTM I check the cookie to see its value. If its equal to 1 (a variation), I change the logo and the menu, according to our previous configuration, and I send a virtual pageview to help us check the data.
Until now, this is working properly.
I am currently working on a web app that will be running in an iframe on the webpages of our customers. Now i would like to setup google analytics tracking in a way that i that i can easily distinguish one customer from the other. My plan is to "fake" subdomains, even though it is always the same TLD, so that i can setup a profile for each customer, but still have overall analytics as well.
For example my URL is http://www.domain.com/#/3 where 3 is the customer id. Now i would like to see that in google analytics as 3.domain.com.
Is that possible by doing something like this:
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXX-1', 'domain.com');
ga('set', 'location', 'http://id.domain.com');
or do i have to go about this in another way? My google analytics knowledge is limited to reading the stats and tracking events and pageviews, so maybe there is a whole different and better way to do this - i am open for suggestions.
Thanks!
It will be much better to use custom variables for this purpose. They give you additional segmentation possibilities on any values and metrics you need, such as customer names or IDs (or both ...)
Site A gives their affiliates an interactive component (traffic map based on Google Maps), which they in turn put on their sites (Site B) in an iframe. The component is dynamic, doesn't change the URL of parent site, and has an id for each affiliate site.
What I would like to do is track the displays of the component. (Price of using Google Maps for the component depends on number of views).
At the moment the component is in <iframe src="http://SiteA.com/q?cp=43.520,18.910,10&cm=1"></iframe>.
I have looked at the other topics but didn't found a solution to that problem. I would really appreciate any help, I had no experience with cross-site tracking yet.
You as siteA owner want to count number of displays of iframe on other sites, correct?
The basic way to do it is logs analysis — every time your server returns page http://SiteA.com/q?cp=43.520,18.910,10&cm=1 or similar it adds an entry to your server's log files. The can be count when. There is a number of solutions for analyzing log data. Some of them opensource and free, other are paid services. For exmaple: http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
There is other ways to count it, but it's probably easiest way of all.
I have been requested to get involved with a family member's site.
To date, they have been paying an SEO outfit, which I believe has been feeding them lies and milking them for money.
I can see that all pages in the site have Google Analytics. However, the SEO outfit refuses to let us see the Analytics page, and has always just forwarded them some (presumably doctored) slideshows.
The only tracking service that lists their site is Compete, which shows a number of visitors far from what they are paying for.
I would like to add their site to my own Analytics account. I have ftp access to their server, and permission from the site owners to modify any files I want.
However, I don't want to do anything that might destroy the entire existing history of analytics data, or even that would interfere with the current SEO outfit [until I have something concrete in-hand].
Does anyone know:
Can I add Analytics to my own account when it was originally setup by someone else?
Will there be any negative results of attempting this?
Any other ideas?
Thanks
Edit: Can anyone suggest a better title - I can tell mine is not good?
I've put two Google Analytics tracking codes from different accounts on the same site without issues. It may cause the site to be a tiny bit slower (as it communicates twice with Google) but it'll do nothing that would delete old data or impede collection of new data.
In short, what you're doing sounds like a good first step.
You will not, however, be able to access past data by doing this. You will be able to compare their numbers with the numbers you're getting, though, which should be valuable.
I don't know if you can add the same domain to two different Google Analytics accounts (easy enough to try, though), but you can always add another service's Javascript snippet, e.g. Woopra. Google and Woopra produced very similiar results in my experiments.
You may want to leave their Google Analytics tracking in place while adding your own Google Analytics tracking. In that case, your numbers should be identical to whatever is being tracked by this third party.
You'll need to set up your own account and then add in the creation of your pagetracker object and your own track page view. You don't need to recreate the entire page code. You can do it with two more lines. It would look something like:
var pageTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //EXISTING pageTracker._trackPageView();
var secondTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //YOUR TRACKING ACCOUNT secondTracker._trackPageView();