Understanding Cross-Domain Tracking – The Basics, Its Importance & How To Get Started
If you have multiple websites or sub-domains for your business and you want to track them in the same Google Analytics account, you need to understand cross-domain tracking and how it works.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the basics of Google cross-domain tracking, why it matters, and some details on how to implement it. This will help you keep your marketing and analytics data in the same place – ensuring you can get more insights about your website’s performance and how you can improve your SEO, marketing campaigns, and more.
What Is Cross-Domain Tracking? Understanding The Basics
Google Analytics cross-domain tracking is pretty simple to understand. It’s the process of measuring two related websites – or even two completely different websites – as one.
For example, if you have a main website like www.example.com as well as a subdomain like shop.example.com, you can integrate both of these domains into one account.
You could even do that with two completely different websites that you own – like www.myblog.com and www.example.com.
This is done by using specialized snippets of code that identify both websites as your own, and integrates the analytics data into a single, unified database.
Why Does Cross-Domain Tracking Matter?
Normally, if a user visits your main website and then clicks to any other microsite, sub-domain or website, Google Analytics will lose track of that session, and it will be terminated.
But with cross-domain tracking, you can maintain user tracking in these situations – which leads to better, more complete data sets about user behavior. This lets you make much better overall decisions – and also allows you to integrate the information you gather into a single Google Analytics dashboard for easy administration.
How Do I Implement Cross-Domain Tracking? Can I Do It On My Own?
To properly implement cross-domain tracking yourself, you must have a lot of knowledge about Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, HTML, JavaScript, how cookies and tracking objects work, and a few other technical skills.
In addition, you must be careful before you dive into the technical aspects of cross-domain tracking – editing the tracking code incorrectly could cause a huge mess and could break functionality completely.
If you’re confident in your technical skills, you can read this guide from Google on how to implement cross-domain tracking from Google. Otherwise, we recommend hiring a professional. For a pro, this is not a very difficult job – and working with an experienced web developer will ensure the project goes off without a hitch.
Implement Cross-Domain Tracking To Improve Your Google Analytics Data Insights
If you own multiple domains, subdomains, or other microsites, collecting them together with cross-domain tracking is an excellent way to combine user data for better insights.
Again, if you have the technical skills to do so on your own, you can get started now – otherwise, we recommend contacting an experienced web developer to ensure a smooth implementation.
