IxDA Industry Session at Irish HCI Conference – 17th-18th September 2009, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

So this was the first event I attended which was held over two days, I have to admit I really was only interested in attending a couple of sessions mainly the ones related to web analytics and search, and I have to say I defintiely was happy with the knowledge shared at the event.

Web Analytics

First up was Niamh Phelan from IQ content discussing how to use Google Analytics, decide on the correct kpi’s/metrics for your business, establish your goals and tweak your website accordingly. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find Niamh’s presentation online but I was able to find a presentation she did previously that shares a lot of the slides:

Ei Presentation on analytics

View more presentations from Lar Veale.

Niamh was great and very helpful, she even was able to give me some advice after the event. One of the areas I was interested in was cross domain tracking on multiple domains and how to implement it.

Why as an Affiliate should I care about Cross Domain tracking?

How to Implement Cross Domain Tracking on Multiple Domains

The scenario

A user searches Google for “cheap widgets”. Your site, www.CheapWidgets.com, appears top of the search results, so the user decides to click on the link to your site. While browsing around, they click a link that leads to your insightful widget blog which is located at blog.CheapWidgets.com.

With the default Google Analytics setup, www.CheapWidgets.com will be seen as a referrer to your blog subdomain and a new set of cookies will be generated for that user, losing sight of information such as the referring site (Google) and the keywords that they used to find you (”cheap widgets”).

Ideally, this information would be preserved across all subdomains and any relevant third party domains that you own.

The solution

Google Analytics does provide a solution for this, but it’s a bit cumbersome:

Step 1: Modify your tracking code to include a couple of extra functions (which is simple enough).
Step 2: Manually tag each link to one of your subdomains or third party domains with a JavaScript function (which is annoying).
Step 3: Remember to tag each link that points to any of your domains (which is a burden). This is something that could very easily be overlooked.

The real solution

Niamh and the guys at IQ have produced a script that will automate this process. It automatically tags links to a set of domains that you configure inside the script.

The first thing you need to do is update the tracking code across each of your domains and subdomains.
Updated tracking code

<script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxx-x"); // Replace with your own account number
    pageTracker._setDomainName(".yourdomain.com"); // Don't forget to update this
    pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
    pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The value of _setDomainName should be the root of the domain you’re installing the code on. So, the value for both blog.CheapWidgets.com and www.CheapWidgets.com would be

pageTracker._setDomainName(“.CheapWidgets.com”);

The next and final step is to download the script, update the domains that you would like to track and include it on your page.
Sample configuration

var domains_to_track =
[
'blog.yourdomain.com',
'wiki.yourdomain.com',
'*.someotherdomain.com'
];

Include the script with the following code (it must appear in the body, just before your tracking code):

<script src="/path/to/js/xdomain.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>