Comments on: How to check whether you are tracking visitors (and conversions) across your websites in Google Analytics (aka cross-domain tracking)

By: david

david — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:20:14 +0000

YUP! that was the issue, but in the proccess of pulling my hair out, i learned a lot

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:03:31 +0000

Have you linked the Analytics account to the AdWords account that is tracking data for that website? If you haven’t, and if you have auto tagging enabled on the AdWords account, then even though the AdWords visits would be reported as Google (cpc), for security reasons, you would not have access to the Keyword/Campaign and adgroup names.

By: david

david — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:17:20 +0000

Hi, i just found this article and I am hoping you could please help me with my cross domain tracking issues.

Just a quick recap, I buy adwords traffic and send them to http://www.A.com, then from A.com, if they want to buy my product, they go to http://www.B.com. on top of passing cookie data from A to B, I would also like to know which page and link they clicked on A.com that sent them to B.com. I can actually track these parameters by using campaign variables and assigning each link its own campaign tracking links.

I set up everything pretty much how google told us to set it up. I made sure that i added the code below on my http://www.A.com website to the GA code in my header

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-for http://www.B.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'www.A.com']);

Then i added the following to my http://www.B.com website GA code:

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-for http://www.B.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'www.B.com']);

I then add the onClick code to the links i wanted to track ( categorize, and label). I copied one below, please notice the utm campaign variables:

so when i tested my links by clicking on them and when i was brought to the next page, i was able to see that the URL contained my campaign variables AND the other utm variables such as __utmb and _utmz, etc.

the only problem is that its not working lol. When i go to the GA account for http://www.B.com, and i look under Advertising >”Adwords” section , i see the number of visitors is correct but everything, and i mean everything is a (not set). I dont know why its not working but its very frustrating.

Is it possbile to do campaign variable tracking AND cross domain tracking in conjunction ?I hope to get some while i still have some sanity left! thank you so much!

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:04:38 +0000

I totally agree, Alex. I’ve updated the post to reflect several of the points you made.

By: AlexJB

AlexJB — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:50:35 +0000

Great article! There’s a lack of decent documentation around cross-domain, and it’s something that many of us who don’t host our own secure domains have to deal with if we want to see conversion funnels and talk about the real effectiveness of campaigns, etc.

Two things worth noting on your test-session technique – it can take up to a day for specific data to appear in GA reports. So your testing cycle will be a little slow with this approach.

Also, it’s generally wise to filter out (aka ignore) traffic from your own org’s network so that you don’t skew your numbers with web visits coming from staff. If you don’t have visibility into the filters that are on your reporting profile, you should check with your administrator, because it will mean you’ll be looking for a test-session that will never show up in GA reports.

Having tried these approaches, I’ve found the Chrome Debugger to be the best – you get immediate feedback and you’re looking at the data as it was sent to Google, so you don’t have to take filters into account.