This is a continuation of my series of google analytics tips that I began a few weeks ago with naming your webpages. Now, I am looking at tracking visitors across different domains or subdomains for the same website. You will need to add some extra variables to your javascript google analytics tracking tag. Otherwise, google analytics won’t realise that they are all part of the same site and your visits will be inflated. Every time a visitor goes from one subdomain or to another domain, they will be treated as new visitor (see below for “what are cookies”).
For example, earlier this year when I began working with a global recruitment agency (no names, I’m British) where they had set up google analytics internally, I discovered that visits weren’t 120,000 a month as they thought – but instead closer to 50,000 visits a month. The reason being that there were 16 domains/subdomain so every time a visitor went from one country site to another (with different domains) google analytics was treating them as new visitors. So quite a big problem that needed to first resolved technically – in order to get the correct numbers – and then with tact (obviously). You also need to make sure you add these extra variables to every webpage/tag where visitors can navigate from one domain or subdomain to another.
For example, if you have a product website, a shopping cart on a subdomain and a company website,
1. www.product. com: product website
2. store.corporate. com: shopping cart
3. www.corporate com: company website
You will need to add three variables to your standard GA tracking tag so that when one visitor for example navigates from corporate.com to product.com to store.corporate.com they will be treated as one visitor and not three which is what would happen otherwise.
The three variables you have to add:
First, utmLinker. This variable should be set to “1″ which means on. The reason is that utmLinker is the actual mechanism that transfers the cookies from one domain to the other. Without utmLinker you’d have two sets of cookies with different data – google analytics would not identify the same visitor crossing domains without it. With utmLinker, two different sets of cookies have the same data so that google analytics knows that this is the same visitor.
Second, uhash. This variable is named _uhash and should be set to “off”. This variable adds a hashed (or encoded) version of the domain name to the tracking cookies. This value is used during processing by the GA system.
Third, udn. This variable is named udn and should be set to “none” for the product website and “company name” for the store.company.com and Company.com
This is what you would add to the google analytics tracking tag for each site:
On product.com
_udn=”none”;
_uhash=”off”;
_ulink=1;
On Store.company. com:
_udn=”Company. com”
_uhash=”off”
_ulink=1
On Company.com:
_udn=”Company. com”
_uhash=”off”
_ulink=1
N.B What is a cookie:
Cookies are used by Web servers to differentiate users and to maintain data related to the user during navigation, across multiple visits to a website and as a way of remembering what visitors do on a website for example buying, removing items online or logging in to a site. For example, they were originally developed as a virtual shopping cart/basket into which visitor could “place” items to purchase, and as they navigate add or remove items from their shopping basket at any time.
To Conclude:
This may seem somewhat dry a subject, but as I highlighted in my introduction – it is vital to get it right. Anyway, we are the new breed of marketers aren’t afraid of a bit of a javascript and statistics:)
If you have any thoughts or questions, or happen to know of any other ways of doing things then do please let me know.
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August 28 2007
Hi Marianina, Where do I add the variables? Should I add them inside the tracking tag and if so where exactly? John
August 30 2007
Hi John, thanks so much for commenting. Yes you do add it inside the standard google analytics tracking tag and you add the variables inside the tag after your UA account number for example,
_uacct = “UA-accountnumber”;
_udn=”none”;
_uhash=”off”;
_ulink=1;
urchinTracker();
If you have programmers who are doing this for you or adding tags with an include file, make sure to brief them. Hope thaat helps.
September 2 2007
Nice to meet you Marianina.
September 10 2007
Thanks for the writeup – just working on a similar issue right now (checkout page on secure.X.com, display page on http://www.x.com, advertising points to http://www.y.com), and your page helped out!
Ari
September 12 2007
Hi Ari, Thanks so much for commenting and glad that you found it useful. Google analytics can be a fantastic tool but you have to be so careful because your site stats could end up being completely wrong if the website isn’t tagged correctly and google’s documentation isn’t always as clear as it could be.
September 17 2007
[...] Marianina Chaplin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
September 18 2007
Hi Marianna,
do you have to adjust your Analytics profile to deal with this “udn” variable? Or does it just work?
thanks
Joel
September 19 2007
Hi Joel,
You don’t need to adjust your profile or add extra filters – you just need to add your udn variables inside your google analytics tracking tag. If for example you have an ecommerce website then you need to tick the box in your profile setting to allow ecommerce details to be caught. But in this instance we are talking about making sure we don’t overinflate site visits by treating navigation between domains or subdomains as one visit. Hope that makes sense. So you just need to add the udn variables on your google analytics tracking tag.
Cheers, Marianina
September 20 2007
Hi Marianina,
I have heard of this customisation before, but I was under the impression that you also had to add the “__utmLinker()” function to the onclick event of all links between domains. Is this true?
Best regards,
Brendan.
September 20 2007
Thanks Marianina,
the situation is that the final steps of the purchase path are on a separate sub domain (e.g. http://www.domain.com and secure.domain.com). Oddly enough I HAD actually seen some goal conversions before which I am suprised at because I had not previously set up the UDN variable and thought that GA would not track it properly without this. Odd eh?
Also, http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27268&ctx=sibling indicates that _udn needs to be the same as the website url in the main GA profile. I would have thought it was just an arbitrary string for association pruposes.
thanks
Joel
September 20 2007
Hi Brendan, Yes you are absolutely right. You need to add the utmlinker every time someone goes from one domain to another – I did write this in my post re- “You also need to make sure you add these extra variables to every webpage/tag where visitors can navigate from one domain or subdomain to another.”
but it probably wasn’t clear enough that you would be adding the udn variables eg utmlinker to the on-click function if this is the way that one is navigating from one page on one domain to another page on another domain via a clickable button for example.
Hope that’s ok.
Hi Joel – thanks so much for commenting. I think that we can all agree that official google analytics documentation is not as clear as it could be.
September 21 2007
Thanks for your response Marianina.
Manually adding utmlinker tags to every link between our multiple domains and subdomains would be a very time consuming task.
Would it be possible to create some JavaScript code to automate this process? I am aware of other JavaScript code that is available for Google Analytics that automates the tracking of other onclick events such as outbound link and file download tracking.
Your thoughts on this would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Brendan.
September 21 2007
Hi Brendan, Multi-domain tracking in a realistic way is difficult with Google analytics because it uses first party cookies. I don’t know any javascript snippet for passing cookies between domains, although they may exist.
Other ways I don’t think work eg if you try passing GA domains in the header via header direction then it may not work because the checksum that is created may not match therefore a new set of cookies would be created (whereas utmlinker attaches the checksum to the url).
One website I worked on had so many domains and links between them that we went for a paid for solution in the end – primarily just because of this utmlinker issue. The paid for solutions track first and third party cookies so you don’t have this problem (no need to add utmlinkers at all) – there are solutions such as clicktracks or indextools that start at very reasonably prices.
Otherwise, it will just take a very long time with google analytics to add utmlinkers to every single link!
Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Marianina
September 26 2007
Hi Marianina, I had a problem regarding this issue some time ago and was terrible to get some help.
I’ve solved the problem in a different way, but this one seems to be more effective. Just one question. With this solution if we have the following structure:
1- product.com/index.php
2- store.company.com/index.php
3- company.com/index.php
Will Google analytics count all the index.php pages together? or as three different pages?
Thanks Marianina!!!
September 27 2007
Hi Juan,
As you correctly identified, Google analytics will treat index.php as one item – unless you you set up an advanced filter which allows the whole host name or uri to be viewed within google analytics. If you go to this post, it show exactly how to add the advanced filter.
http://marianina.com/blog/2007/07/28/google-analytics-tip-1-naming-your-webpages/
Thanks,
Marianina
October 2 2007
Hi Marianina,
There is no reference to the _uhash=off line in GA support. Are you sure multiple domain tracking in a single account will fail if this variable is set to on.
thanks,
Andrés
October 2 2007
Hi Andres,
Thanks so much for your question. What GA documentation does is tell us what do if we either have subdomain OR multi-domains. To track across multiple domains AND subdomains, you have to use this extra _uhash variable in your tracking.
But if you only have subdomains or if you only have different domains then you don’t need to use _uhash and only need to use udn and ulink.
Does that help?
Marianina
October 9 2007
Hello! I’ve been going crazy trying to figure this out, regarding which “UA-XXXX-X” code to use in multiple subdomains…
Situation: we have http://www.company.com and register.company.com.
“www” is the main site and has the UA code XXXX-1.
“Register” is a secure site for subscriptions, and has the UA code XXXX-4.
From what I’ve read, we need to add the _udn=”company.com” line to all the pages on both subdomains to view data in one report.
But, do we keep the UA code XXXX-1 or XXXX-4? Then, do we apply that code to both sites? Or do we leave them as-is, with each subdomain having its own UA code, but with the _udn code, rolling up to the http://www.company.com domain?
Thank you very much for your insights!
October 11 2007
Hi Erica
Thanks so much for commenting and for your question. I have been away with work so quite tied up.
Anyway, in answer to your question. I’ll post a response on my blog tomorrow morning.
Re But, do we keep the UA code XXXX-1 or XXXX-4? Then, do we apply that code to both sites? Or do we leave them as-is, with each subdomain having its own UA code, but with the _udn code, rolling up to the http://www.company.com domain?
I don’t know all the details here, but in essence it could be simpler to only use one UA code for both http://www.company.com and register.company.com – and then set up different profiles to track for example just one part of the site(s) using the advanced filters you can access from within google analytics.
Because it would be alot easier to see overall site traffic, navigation etc, for all subdomains, if it was on one google analytics account.
and then set up the _udn=”company.com” to all pages on both subdomains etc
Is there a specific reason why there are separate UA codes set up for the different subdomains when they are I believe the same website?
Hope that makes sense
Marianina
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