Google AnalyticsIf you use Google Analytics, monitoring your traffic sources is a great idea. And if you only have one domain, Analytics works fine out of the box.

You start to run into problems however, when you operate multiple domains or subdomains. By default, Google Analytics tracks each of your subdomains as unique, so when a visitor comes in to your site on subdomain1.yourwebsite.com, but then clicks on a link to subdomain2.yourwebsite.com, their campaign information gets overwritten – so the visitor looks like a referral from your first subdomain.

From a marketing view this is extremely unhelpful, and Analytics suggest adjusting your javascript tags, to pass a visitor’s session details across your subdomains. The problem is, that even after making these changes I was still seeing self-referrals from other ProspectSoft subdomains:

Analytics Self Referrals

<geekout>

A quick Google search pulls up a lot of speculation and possible solutions to this problem. Some suggest using _setAllowHash (as per Google’s recommendations), others not. Most suggest using _setDomainName, although some suggest having a full stop at the start of your domain (['_setDomainName','.yourwebsite.com']); others suggest removing the dot and not using setAllowHash. Others then recommend using (['_addIgnoredRef', 'yourwebsite.com'])!

</geekout>

Confused yet? I certainly was!

After trawling through the range of available opinions and advice, the best I found came from the knowledgeable people at ROI Revolution (http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2011/01/google_analytics_subdomain_tracking.php).

I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, but help with advanced customizations can be difficult to find! (Have you tried ringing Google recently?) After implementing the changes ROI Revolution recommend, my report now looks like this:

No self-referrals!No self-referrals!

Also: notice the importance of tagging your campaigns: in the screenshot above my email campaigns are coming in already tagged with email as the traffic medium. If you don’t do this; your email traffic will appear as direct traffic, and you won’t have the ability to segment your data to see what your email visitors get up to after the click. You can manually tag your email links using Google’s URL builder, or if you are a ProspectSoft Email Marketing customer, you can set your emails up to be automatically tagged without any manual work.

About the author:  Rob Drummond is a marketing communications specialist at ProspectSoft. Read more from this author