GTM / GA: Cross-Domain Tracking (VIEWS & GOALS)

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Situation: I have used Google Tag Manager to set up Google Analytics (GA - Universal) on a multisite network. There is one GTM container, and each website has its own GA property. I used a GTM variable to reference all of the GA properties. I am able to track cross-domain sessions. In testing, I am able to follow a user's session across multiple domains under the same session / client ID.

Problem: I'm stuck with what to do next. I'd like to create some Goals and Views that track a user's journey through my sites and measure the usual stats (bounce, drop-off points conversions, etc.). However, I'm not sure where to begin. I see plenty of information on the Internet for how to set up cross-domain GA tags in GTM. However, I don't see anything out there for how to create Views and Goals for cross-domain setups. A few questions that come to mind are:

  1. Do I create Goals in the destination site's GA account (e.g. mycheckout.com), or the site where the session begins (e.g. myproductinfo.com)?
  2. When creating Goals, do I only use the permalink slug, or the entire link? I thought I could only add the permalink.
  3. How does this information roll up into one report?

I found this link, but I'm not sure if it's the 'best practice'. I would greatly appreciate it if someone who has previously implemented this could provide an outline of best practices, or a link to a good tutorial on the subject.

Thanks for your help! Chris

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google-analyticscross-domaingoogle-tag-manager
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not presenting an issue with coding. Rather, you should post this to Webmasters. One comment though, with multiple properties for your multiple sites, it's not possible to create a goal that tracks across those sites. You should use a roll-up property for that. - nyuen
Thanks. Could you clarify a bit? Do you mean that I should use one property across all of the sites? Or, are you suggesting I use GA Premium? - Chris
If you want to track a (destination) goal that starts on site #1 and ends on site #2, then you will need to have the same property on both sites. You can't track page paths from two different sites into one property if each site has a different tracker - for that you'll need to use a common tracker (or roll-up). You don't need 360 for this as you can double tag your sites (so site #1 has its own tracker as well as a roll-up, and site #2 has its own tracker and, again, the roll-up). - nyuen
@nyuen - Thanks for clarifying! I found an article that seems to describe what you are recommending. I'll post it here in case anyone else is looking for a similar solution - e-nor.com/blog/google-analytics/… - Chris

1 Answers

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You need to understand GA definition of Views and Properties. Views are like database table views: you can either show the whole table or a sample of it.

To have all data collected without sampling a "Raw Data" view (no filters) should always be used. Each view has its own conversion goal definitions. So in the "Raw Data" view you can create a goal for any page tracked. If you filter a view for one domain (e.g. "confirmation.com View with appropriate filters"), only goals for this domain should be created (otherwise they will never count a conversion).

When creating goals you can define filters for the "ga:pagePath" parameter. So it depends on your GA tracking setup, what part of the URL it tracks. Go into chrome web developer toolbar and hit the "network" tab. Open your page in this tab. Then search for requests ending with "collect", these are the data trackpoints send to GA. There you can debug what URL information is sent to GA (search for the "dl" parameter within the query string parameters list).