Read Google Analytics Cookie Script

I’ve taken some time out to write a script that provides a nice API to access Google cookies. If you’ve seen the Google cookies before, they can look pretty cryptic and will require you to memorise the syntax of how the cookies are formed which you don’t necessarily want to do to save brain space.

 I won’t really go into the intricate details of Google cookies so this post will assume you know what you’re looking for. I may write up a post to explain more in-depth how Google cookies work later on. In the mean time, you can watch this presentation by Google on cookies (it’s pretty good!) or read the documentation to find out more about Google cookies.

So how is this useful? Well it really depends. You may use it to read GA campaign values and integrate it with your CRM system to track where your leads/sales are coming from or write custom scripts that integrate with GA (i.e. custom variables). It’s really up to you!

Anyway, on to the script.
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How To Track Sub-Domains / Cross-Domains in Google Analytics

First of all, let me explain why in Google Analytics you need to do some configurations to track sub-domains / cross-domains.

Google Analytics does not do this by default, thus whenever you’re on sub1.domain.com and you go to sub2.domain.com, Google Analytics will record this as a referral rather than maintaining the same session and the same campaign information. If you’re running e-commerce tracking and you use sub-domains during the e-commerce process, this will totally screw up your reports as it will attribute all transactions to referrals (from your own site) and you will have no idea how your other online marketing campaigns (i.e. direct, organic, cpc) are performing.

Sub-Domain Tracking

This one is fairly easy. The method you need to use is _setDomainName().

The _setDomainName() method sets the Google cookies to the domain name string parameter that it is given, otherwise it automatically resolves the domain name from the location object in the DOM if no parameter is given. This means that on sub-domains, the cookies will be set to separate sub-domains.

So to configure Google Analytics to set the cookies to the same domain name, simply use the domain name as the string parameter for the _setDomainName() method.

E.g. If I have a website called sub1.dannytalk.com and sub2.dannytalk.com, I would use _setDomainName(‘dannytalk.com’) throughout all my pages (sub-domains and main domain).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x"); // replace this with your own account number
pageTracker._setDomainName("dannytalk.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The Google API officially states to use the period at the start of the domain name. I have tried with and without and it seems to work fine but I prefer without period (looks nicer).

Once you’ve done this, Google Analytics should record all visits to these sub-domains as the same visit, maintaining the same campaign information. However, in your reports,you won’t be able to tell which request URI came from which sub-domain as the domain name is stripped out from the reports.

In addition, if you have two sub-domains that have the same page name (i.e. index.html), then Google Analytics will combine these two into one which will artificially inflate your page statistics.

A simple way around this is to implement what I call a sub-domain visibility filter which will prefix your request URI’s with the domain name. This will help you differentiate the pages as well as avoid inflating the page statistics.

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