Business Benefits of Cross Domain Tracking Using Google Analytics

Business Benefits of Cross Domain Tracking Using Google Analytics

• As an effective web analytics tool, Google Analytics is mostly used to tracking data originating from a single business domain. • Business enterprises also want to delve deeper into understanding their customer behavior and their digital footprint across multiple domains.

As a result of this business requirement, cross-domain tracking has emerged as a reliable tool for tracking online users across multiple domains using Google Analytics.

An example of a customer interacting across multiple domains is that of an online shopper using an eCommerce store (for shopping) and a thirdparty site (for making the payment).

What is Cross-Domain Analysis?

Also referred to as site linking, cross-domain tracking (or analysis) using Google Analytics is defined as the mechanism of linking two (or more websites) and viewing them holistically through Google Analytics reports.

Does every business website require crossdomain tracking as part of its data analytics strategy? The answer is a “no.� A majority of business and blogging website analytics can suffice by tracking just one website domain at a time.

Cross-domain analysis is primarily used for functions like E-commerce tracking or conversion tracking that happens across multiple domains. For example (as mentioned before), you have an eCommerce shop hosted on <myshoppingstore.com> and a third-party shopping cart that is hosted on <shoppingcart.com/myshoppin gstore>, then it becomes imperative to execute enhanced eCommerce tracking for crossdomain analysis.

How to Set Up Cross-Domain Tracking

For convenience, you can easily set up cross-domain tracking using GTM (short for â&#x20AC;&#x153;Google Tag Managerâ&#x20AC;?).

As the name suggests, GTM is a tag management tool from Google where you can easily configure and deploy analytics-related tags for a website or a smartphone app

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For each website that it tracks, Google Analytics retrieves a unique Client ID that is stored in the form of website cookies.

No website can retrieve or access the Client ID or cookies stored on another website.

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However, in the case of cross-domain tracking, Google Analytics must be able to transfer the Client IDs across multiple domains that it is tracking. This is achieved through the Google Analytics linking feature by which the Client ID (of a source domain) is placed in the URL link that can be accessed by the destination domain.

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If you are using gtag.js, cross-domain tracking can be enabled by adding the link parameter (with the Client ID and other metadata information) to the URL pointing to the destination domain.

Here is how you can set up or check for cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics. For easier understanding, let’s take an example where you are implementing cross-domain tracking for two websites (“site1.com” and “site2.com”).

• Login to your Google Analytics account and configure a single property. Use the same Client ID and tracking code for both domains (“site1” and “site2”).

• Edit your tracking code (for “site1” domain) with the following changes (highlighted in bold). ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXXXXX-X’, ‘auto’, {‘allowLinker’: true}); ga(‘require’, ‘linker’); ga(‘linker:autoLink’, [‘site2.com’] ); • Similarly, edit the tracking code (for “site2” domain) with the same changes (shown above). The only difference is adding “site1.com” in place of “site2.com.”

After completing these steps, you need to next set up the referral exclusions using the Google Tag Manager tool: • Create a new variable in the GTM tool.

• Select the new variable and add all the domains that you wish to link up.

• Add the new variable to the Google Analytics Pageview tag.

• Navigate to the “Cross Domain Tracking” menu options under “More Settings.”

• Add your new variable in the “Auto Links Domain” field.

• Additionally, set the “allowLinker” box to “true.”

• Next, you need to configure the Referral Exclusion list in order to avoid any self-referrals.

• Navigate to the “Referral Exclusion List” section under “Tracking Info.”

• Add the applicable domains (in our case, “site1.com” and “site2.com”) to the exclusion list.

• Finally, save the settings and test the setup for efficient crossdomain tracking.

Benefits of a Cross-Domain Analysis Dashboard

Based on the data collected from cross-domain tracking, a cross-domain analysis dashboard is a virtualization tool that can help you understand your customer behavior across multiple domains and for other business goal tracking.

Here are some of the benefits of designing a cross-domain analysis dashboard for your business: Track the Conversion Path Google Analytics data across multiple domains enables any business to track users across the entire conversion path.

Conversion tracking provides business insights into focus areas like: â&#x20AC;˘

How the customers found the business website in the first place.

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Whether the incoming traffic originated from a Google organic search result page (or through a paid search) or from other referral websites or social media pages.

Set up a Google Analytics sales funnel across websites â&#x20AC;˘ Using cross-domain tracking, you can execute a sales funnel creation that traverses across multiple websites. For instance, a sales funnel for an eCommerce store can include the product detail pages, shopping cart page, product shipping page, and payment page (even when they are hosted on different web domains).

Track site events In addition to domain tracking, Google Analytics can also be used for event tracking across website domains. This enables any business to determine what their users are doing

before and after landing on their websites.

Key Parameters for Cross-Domain Analysis

TRACKING ID

REFERRAL EXCLUSION DOMAINS

URL LINKER

ALLOWLINKER

Conclusion

Through this article, we have discussed how cross-domain tracking using Google Analytics can enable the business to understand customer behavior across multiple domains. As a data analytics and business intelligence company, Countants have powered the benefits of Google Analytics and Cloud analytics for its global customers.

For More Such Information Visit www.countants.com