HOW TO MAKE USE OF CROSS DOMAIN TRACKING

Synopsis

Your website spans across multiple domains and sub-domains. You want to track all of them under a single Google Analytics property. You want to make sure that a visitor who moves across all these different domains and sub-domains is tracked as a single visitor, and his session is not reset when he moves across domains. Since analytics tracking relies on the browser cookie, which is domain-specific, this situation is trickier than it appears. That is why in this scenario, you need to make sure you have properly implemented cross-domain tracking in your Google Analytics.

Cross-Domain Links for sub-domains via Universal Analytics

If you have upgraded to the Universal Analytics tracking code “analytics.js” (which you should), then you have no problems when the visitor moves across sub-domains. That is now handled automatically by the Universal Analytics tracking code.

Handling Cross-Domain Links across multiple domains

If you want to track how your visitor moves across different primary domains, you need to decorate your cross-domain links with Google Analytics parameters to make sure that the receiving page knows which analytics session the visitor came from. The receiving page will then know that it should continue the visitor session instead of starting a new one.

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