Let’s begin by dispelling the myth that cross-domain tracking is difficult to set up: it isn’t. If all you want to do is get cross-domai...
Let’s begin by dispelling the myth that cross-domain tracking is difficult to set up: it isn’t.
If all you want to do is get cross-domain tracking functioning correctly on your website, feel free to skip ahead to the section titled “Part II: Steps to Setting Up Cross-Domain Tracking.” If you follow the steps outlined in that section, you will have a correctly functioning installation of cross-domain tracking with no changes to your existing data.
There are, however, some confusing aspects of cross-domain tracking, and they all have to do with understanding the concepts behind it.
If you feel you need to brush up on the broad picture of cross-domain tracking, don’t skip ahead, just keep reading—because Part I of this article will explain the following:
- What is cross-domain tracking?
- Why would I need cross-domain tracking?
- What are the implications of cross-domain tracking?
PART I: OVERVIEW OF CROSS-DOMAIN TRACKING
1. WHAT IS CROSS-DOMAIN TRACKING?
Cross-domain tracking is a way to analyze visitors across multiple websites in a single analytics view. Implementing cross-domain tracking essentially allows you to report on the traffic of multiple websites as if they were one big website.
From a conceptual point of view, Google has added its fair share of red tape to what could be a very simple thing to achieve. I suspect that a correctly set up GA account is used as partial input into the RankBrain portion of Google’s ranking algorithm (in effect—positive feedback propagation), though I have little concrete evidence to support this.
In Part I of this guide, I will attempt to explain the concepts behind this implementation process. This will be helpful to those of you who have read enough to be effective, but still cannot fully grasp cross-domain tracking.
Part II is a step-by-step procedure for implementing cross-domain tracking. Feel free to skip ahead to that section if you don’t care about “why” this is the only method that works.
2. WHY WOULD I NEED CROSS-DOMAIN TRACKING?
First and foremost, please be sure that you are looking to track users across multiple domains and not multiple subdomains.
If you are unsure of the difference, please read the “Cross-subdomain vs. Cross-domain” section of the following article: How to Track Users Across Subdomains.
3. WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF CROSS-DOMAIN TRACKING?
With conventional GA account set up (without cross-domain tracking), there is a 1:1 ratio of domains to properties—meaning that each domain under a given account is set up as its own property with a unique tracking ID.
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