The process of implement
cross-domain tracking can be tricky and if not done correctly can fail or cause
inaccurate information to be collected in the client’s analytic tools. There
are many blog posts and columns to configure cross-domain tracking, however,
what these posts don’t contain is why a business should or should not implement
cross-domain tracking. What are the benefits of cross-domain tracking and are
there any risks associated with it?
What is Cross-domain tracking?
Cross-domain tracking makes it
possible for Analytics to see sessions on two related sites as a single
session. Cross-domain allows you to view a website visitor’s session as they
navigate from one domain to another as part of a single customer journey from
the point of acquisition to conversion.
When and when not to implement Cross-domain tracking?
Implementing a cross-domain
tracking solution isn’t the answer to poorly configured website. First problem
statement is - “If you go to our site with domain.com everything is fine, but
you also get there with www.domain.com and everything is also fine, but as you
navigate the site, sometimes a user gets the www and sometimes they don’t.” The answer is yes cross-domain tracking can help, but you’re better off having your
admin fix it with one line in the .htacess file to either show the www or not
show it every time.
Another problem statement is - “We
have a few sites domainA.com, domainB.com and domainC.com and want to see how
many people navigate between them.” This may sound like a perfect reason to
implement cross-domain tracking, but when you dig a bit deeper and ask “Do you
have links between your sites?” or “Are the sites related in some specific
way?” and you get the answer “No!”, then what they are asking for isn’t
cross-domain tracking, but rather “session stitching” which is far more complex
to implement.
What cross-domain tracking, is
truly intended for is connecting the data flow between related sites. For
example, perhaps you have all your marketing landing pages on a sub-domain of
www1.domain.com and clicking on the call to action takes the user to a
different domain (perhaps to complete a form i.e., ecommerce.domain.com) and
once they’ve completed this task they are then returned to your public site of
www.domain.com with additional conversion opportunities. In this customer
journey, a visitor would encounter three domains and as a business owner, you
need to know which ads drove conversions and potentially if running A/B testing
on landing pages which landing pages yield conversions. This is the perfect
scenario to implement cross-domain tracking.
Perhaps you operated multiple
domains in support of a common target audience that does link to each other and
the services promoted on each of them. Once again, this is a perfect reason to
implement cross-domain tracking as part of a roll-up analytics report.
While
a bit of a stretch, if your organization operates multiple websites that aren’t
linked together you can through some custom reporting and the use of
Attribution Modeling and Multi-Channel reporting, view if a user visited
associated websites (including which ones) before converting on the final one.
This last option can be extremely tricky to implement, expensive and fraught
with holes that may limit the reliability of the data. However, to some people,
a bit of data is better than no data at all.
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