Cross domain tracking in Google analytics without passing the session ID to the URL

1
votes

I have got three domains as follows

domain-one.com, domain-two.com, domain-three.com

The user goes to domain-one.com on day one. The same user goes to domain-two.com after two days and closes the page. Finally after one month he visits domain-three.com.

In this case can Google analytics determine it is the same user who visited all the three domains on seperate occasions ?

Please Note:

  1. In Google analytics I have increased the session duration to a longer number of days.
  2. In Google Tag manager I have enabled cross domain tracking with the options allowLinker and Allow Link Domains option.
  3. Since the user visits each domain on different ocassions, the session ID will not be attached to the subsequent domains as domain-two.com?_ga2.20567980 etc.

I would like to know whether the above tracking is possible in google analytics. If possible are there any other steps which has to be followed to achieve this beyond step 1 and step 2 but keeping step 3 in mind ?

1
google-analytics

1 Answers

1
votes

Cross-domain tracking, if it is implemented correctly (same property, allow linker, etc...), it works if a user browses from a domain to another through a link in the previous site. This link carries with it a parameter that is the clientId (not the session id but the Analytics user identifier, that is the value of the _ga cookie).

If an user visits the 3 sites independently, i.e. without going through the previous one via a link, a different Analytics user will be considered.

This is because the parameter that is passed in queryString (_ga=), which is precisely the Google Analytics user identifier, is used for the second site to use the same value, thus keeping the same user. Without this condition a new clientId will be generated and for Google Analytics these are different users.