2009

Google Analytics tracking across multiple domains

Posted By : Shaun McCran
Related Categories: Best practices, SEO Methodologies, Javascript, Web technologies

I recently came across an issue where an online application was crossing several domains during the customer experience, and the Google Analytics tracking was losing the referrer when they left the originating domain.

The usual Google Analytics tracking code is:

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1<s cript type="text/javascript">
2var tracker = _gat._getTracker("#GACode#");
3            tracker._setDomainName("none");
4            tracker._setAllowLinker(true);
5            tracker._initData();
6            tracker._trackPageview();
7</script>

With the addition of two extra lines:

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1tracker._setDomainName("none");
2tracker._setAllowLinker(true);

We can force each link to carry the cookie data over to the next domain, maintaining the user data throughout.

There is one other small change. Any href that transitions from one domain to the next has to include an onclick event that tells it to use a tracker method.

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1<a href=http://domain.com/page.cfm onclick="tracker._link('http://domain.com/page.cfm'); return false;">Link Text </a>

We need to do something similar to form submissions:

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1<form onsubmit="tracker._linkByPost(this)">

In this way the user cookie is maintained across multiple domains.