Dev and SEO

This post is a followup to Google Analytics Subdomain Tracking Not Working pt1.

Previously, I showed you how to do a quick audit of Google Analytic’s cookie behavior, specifically, to identify a common cross site tracking issues. Today, we’ll take a look at how to fix what seems to be a common issue (here) with Google Analytic’s cross site tracking: excessive self referrals and direct traffic. The fix will involve configuring Google Analytic’s javascript in some very unintuitive ways.  While this fix is not ideal, it will properly attribute referrals as well as any site goals you may set (such as checking out).

Please note that I am not a Google Analytics guru. The solution I’m sharing here worked for me and if you are grappling with the same issue, hopefully it will work for you. But no promises.

According to Google’s documentation, we want to configure Analytic’s javascript in the following way:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.example-petstore.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);


In particular, we’re told to insert a leading ‘.’ before our domain and _setAllowHash should be configured to false. Unfortunately, this didn’t work for me and it’s not working for you.

What did work was removing the leading period before the domain, setting ‘_setAllowHash’ to true as well as adding another line to ignore referrals from nationalbuildersupply. Here is the full Google Analytics example (make sure you include the javascript html tags):


var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-5971864-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'nationalbuildersupply.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', true]);
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredRef', 'nationalbuildersupply.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();


This must be configured on all subdomains you wish to track. For example, when tracking a visitor from www.nationalbuildersupply.com to secure.nationalbuildersupply (for checkout in this example), the javascript for both sites should be set to the above.

While this will solve the self and direct referral issues and properly record visitor traffic, we are essentially disabling cross site tracking and configuring our primary domain and subdomain to simply report themselves as ‘nationalbuildersupply.com’. Furthermore, this WILL NOT WORK for cross domain tracking – when you want to track a user from ???.nationalbuildersupply.com to ???.someotherdomain.com. Browser security does not allow a site on abc.com to modify xyz.com’s cookies (if it could, then any site you visit could lift your personal cookies for any other site, such as bankofamerica.com and facebook.com).

Additionally, tracking on your subdomain will double count visitors. Unfortunately, there is no javascript fix to this. Instead, Google Analytics filters need to be configured to ignore this (and yes, there are problems with doing this as well).

You can view a working example on nationalbuildersupply.com.  Just crack open the source html and search for: var _gaq = _gaq || [];. With these settings, we were able to track visitors from www.nationalbuildersupply.com through the checkout process, which takes place on secure.nationalbuildersupply.com.

I’ll follow up with more material explaining the inner workings of Google Analytics in further detail, including implications and other limitations. Included will be filter workarounds.