What it is
In many cases, the user journey involves more than one domain or multiple subdomains. For example, booking and payment actions often happen on a subdomain. Therefore, getting uninterrupted tracking of the whole user journey may take a little extra work on our part.
When visitors visit more than 1 site within a family of sites that you manage and track analytics, that’s cross-domain movement. For instance, if your home page is yoursite.com and your shop is shop.yoursite.com (subdomain) or youronlineshop.com (different domain).
Why it matters
So unless some steps are taken in the setup of your Analytics system, when a user moves from one part of the tracked ecosystem, the original source information for that user will be lost when the domain changes.
This has a particular impact as moving from domain to domain or domain to subdomain often marks an interaction that should be tracked with a goal, and preserving the source information of converting users is important.
What to do
- All domains and subdomains in the tracking ecosystem should be added:
- As referral exclusions in Google Analytics.
- To the Google Analytics pageview tag cross domain settings in Google Tag Manager.
