I have google analytics installed for my own domain, http://mydomain.com. Will a user that enters http://www.mydomain.com be counted by the analytics script too?
To me it seems logical that it would, since it is so common to have the naked domain address be the same site as the www-prefixed one, but the analytics documentation doesn't state it explicitly.
Yes, users will be tracked, but the same visitor coming from www.datalookups.com and datalookups.com will be counted as two different visitors. GA uses cookies to store session information on visitors, and since www.datalookups.com and datalookups.com are different hosts, different cookies belong to them. To get over this issue, I suggest to set up a proper HTTP redirection that brings permanently either user from www.datalookups.com to datalookups.com or vice versa—it's a matter of taste. (Not to mention that this method balks search engine crawlers to index your web content twice.)
For the sake of completeness, there is a way to tell Google Analytics to share session information between to different hosts with the pageTracker._setDomainName function, but that is not the right answer for the current situation.
Yes, that has been my experience.
Related
We have a web service which is installed on different stations. Each has a different ip and domain. we want all of them to report to the same suite.
Can this be done?
The JavaScript tracker for Google Analytics can be used if you allow calls to the Google Servers, if you allow your clients to execute JS and either can set cookies or provide a client id in some other way (must not be personally identifiable data).
If you cannot use Javascript then you could still collect data via the measurement protocol, although this might require substantial development effort.
The domain setting in the Google Analytics interface does not affect data collection, it is used in the (soon to be removed) in-page analytics feature and as base url for the "open document" feature in the behavior reports.
Google Analytics does not collect by domain, but by property ID (UA-XXXXXXX-X), else cross-domain tracking would not be possible (it is actually a documented feature).
Cross domain tracking would be important if somebody could hop from one of your stations/domains to the other and you wanted this to be tracked as a single session. This does not seem to be your use case.
The only pitfall is that the reports display page paths, not full URIs. So if you have similar paths on all your stations the metrics for the page paths will be lumped together unless you do a breakdown by hostname. A common workaround is to add a filter to your data view that prepends the hostname to the path, or to provide custom paths in the first place.
But basically this is not a problem. If you do not need cross domain tracking you'll be okay if you dump the same tracking code in all your sites.
I have a web site that several parts are hosted in a different name server. but they are practically the sub parts of the same sites. (i know it's badly designed)
Currently, i get analytics data for each domain. but what i don't like about that is when you are jumping to the other domain, it marks as a drop off. Is there anyway that i could setup analytics in such a way that it treats both domains as a single website?
You are looking for cross domain tracking. Google has quite extensive documentation on this. Follow the instructions for Cross Domain Autolinking, manual linking is usually unnecessary and somewhat error prone.
The basic idea is that, since the cookie that stores the client id is domain specific, the id that identifies users must be carried over in some way from one domain to another. This is done by putting it in the url, in a parameter named "ga". If the other domain is configured for cross domain tracking it will take the parameter from the url instead of generating it's own client id. When GA processes the data on the serverside it will recognize that the calls from the different domains (but the same client id) belong to the same session.
Google Analytics (via the autolinking plugin) provides functions that automatically "decorate" links and form, i.e. they add the ga parameter to the links that point to the linked domain, or to form actions. This works well with plain links and forms, but might not always work with javascript callbacks on the links that redirect instead of just following the link.
Using the Google Analytics API I would like to display the domain associated with each GA profile. Is this possible or is there another way to do it? I have been unable to find any documentation for the domain.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceAccountFeed.html#accountResponse
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mgmt/mgmtFeedReference.html#profileFeed
I can't use profileName because depending on how the user has their GA account setup, it may just be a string and not a domain.
One thing you might do is perform a query using ga:hostnames as the dimension and either ga:visits or ga:pageviews as metrics. This will yield a chart of the host name (what is in the browser address bar) to reach that site. Sort of a hack in a way. Technically you can use a single GA Tracking code on multiple sites. So there is no "Official" domain name associated with a profile.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible with the current API. Furthermore, you can't explicitly depend upon the domain they enter as the only domain the profile is tracking since there is further customization that allows the user to specify if they want to track subdomains and/or top-level domains. I believe your only option is to ask the user the same information Google asks the user and help the user understand they will have to manually keep two lists in sync due to limitations of the Google API.
Say, I've a website www.website.com, and we are maintaining a subdomain sub.website.com for blogging. Now my question, what is a good practice of having google analytics for both domains, same tracking for both or individually? and why?
Regards
Generally speaking, the best practice is to keep subdomains of the same domain on the same account. (The exception is if the subdomains are completely unrelated sites.)
It's important, though, to adjust your Google Analytics snippet to set its cookies on the root domain, so that users who traffic between subdomains are tracked as a single visit, instead of multiple visits.
You can accomplish that by putting the following call before your _trackPageview call:
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'example.com']);
Then, on the account management side, you can setup filters for individual subdomains (using Hostname filtering) so that you can get a snapshot of both the combined traffic and the individual subdomains.
EDIT: Removed the leading period on the URL. This will make it compatible with past traffic that doesn't have a setDomainName call.
[Expanded from comment above, as ran out of chars]
The setDomainName command as noted above will work, but if you're using an existing GA setup, using setDomainName = "example.com" (no leading dot) will retain existing GA user IDs, so the new-user metrics will still be valid (GA hashes the domainname into the user ID, but strips "www.example.com" down to "example.com" before hashing. However ".example.com" will hash to a different value, and the user IDs for returning users will not match their original IDs.
If you're starting a fresh site, use ".example.com" (and it's sometimes required for sites with deep FQDN), and don't forget to check what's being sent back to the GA with Firebug.
I think you can get away with just one domain. I never tried to use subdomains, but even with one domain, Google analytics gives you a good breakdown and visibility of the stats. Plus the urls of the pages are different and you can differentiate on that even if you track a single domain. Plus you will avoid domain-clutter.
I don't want to be counted as visitor every time I test my page in the hosting. Does Google know i'm the owner of the site by checking if i'm logged in my Gmail account?
I don't think Google does anything like this automatically. But they do provide instructions for excluding based on IP address (or range) and apparently also now by cookie. If you use a CMS or admin interface, you could put the code they provide in an HTML file that you then include into the admin interface pages by IFRAME (to ensure that the cookie stays set for anyone who uses that interface).
One option is to install Ghostery addon your browser. Ghostery can block trackers and scripts used on webpages likes google analytics, google adword and other adwares.
You can also block or unblock the trackers for a specific site or specific tracker for a particular site.This add on is available for Firefox and chrome browsers. If you have this installed on your browser, your visit wont be counted as google analytic script wont be executed.
You can learn more about ghostery at: http://www.ghostery.com/about
There are also often application specific ways of blocking google from counting administrators. For example I've used a wordpress analytics plugin that would automatically not include the tracking code if the user was logged in as an administrator. If you are application has the concept as admin then you could write something similar that controls when the code is added.
If you visit your site frequently from connections with a dynamic IP address, eg. home broadband, then excluding IP addresses is not particularly practical. To go beyond IP exclusion, you can create an isolated page on your site that only you know about that includes a call to Analytics to label your cookie.
The Google Analytics _setVar() function lets you label yourself with an arbitrary string, eg. 'internal'. You only need to do this once per browser as long you don't clear your cookies.
Having labelled yourself as 'internal', you can create an Advanced Segment within Google Analytics to exclude visitors with that label.
Google Analytics relay on you embedding a call to their JavaScript see this link - do not confuse it with how Google does page ranking.
So the answer to your question is that your pages should be smart enough to recognize when the request comes from you and skip the call to the JavaScript.