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Cross Domain Tracking is also known as 'site linking' and is a setting of Google Analytics. In some situations, you may want to create two websites or a website with two domains in an account property; if you have an online store, for example. One page is the store and the other the shopping cart. With cross domain tracking, sessions on these two websites can be considered as one session by Google Analytics. With cross domain tracking you therefore gain better insight into your visitor behaviour.
When can you use cross domain tracking?
Cross domain tracking is interesting in various situations, such as when you have a website with multiple domains. When visitors click from the root domain to the subdomain, the root domain is considered a redirect in Google Analytics. Cross domain tracking prevents this, so conversions on the subdomain are not assigned to the main domain. This way you can better determine the success of the channel.
Add the same Google Analytics code to every domain
Once you have added the domain codes you want to track with cross domain, all traffic between these pages will be tracked by Google Analytics. Again, Google Analytics now thinks all traffic is referrals. So we don't want that.
What we want is for the original source of website traffic to be carried through to the other domains. For example, when a potential customer comes to Chanel's website via Google Adwords, we can't see it without cross domain tracking.
Referral Exclusions
A referral actually starts a new session by default. When you exclude a referral source, a new session is not started based on the traffic from the excluded domain coming into the site. Incidentally, if you do want a new session to be started with the traffic of the intended website, you should not exclude that website.
Enable auto-link plugin
This point may be a bit technical, but not difficult to apply. Anyway, here's what to look out for:
To track the behavior of website visitors, Google Analytics uses cookies. These cookies store some data about the visitor and send it back to Google Analytics. Easy enough, right?
It only gets complicated when the information that should come from the cookie has to be accessible to your other domains. In other words, the Google Analytics code for another domain can't get to the cookie information for your main domain and that's exactly what we want. As I said, maybe a bit technical but really all you need to know is to enable the auto-link plugin to avoid this. Still very difficult? No problem, we like it, so give us a call!
Ok, almost done..
The last thing to watch out for
Make sure you read the Google Analytics code the plugin auto-link, otherwise the previous point doesn't make much sense. This may also sound more technical than it is, all you need to know is that you need to add the following link to Google Analytics code:
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXX-X', 'auto', { allowLinker: true });
That was it! When you apply these points when implementing your cross domain tracking, you use them as efficiently as possible. Do you have any questions for us or do you want to work with us? Please do not hesitate to contact us. We think along with you it's what we do.
