Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?
-
Hi!
One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue?
How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain?
Thanks!
-
I can't speak for all analytics programs, but I can say that YES - with Google Analytics and Omniture, at least - clicks from the subdomain to the main domain will show up as referral traffic on a default installation.
However, there are ways around this. For instance:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55524 -
Hi Dylan,
Thanks - that was very helpful. I sent the link off to the site webmaster, so hopefully that will be taken care of.
-
Hi,
Purely on personal experience (don't know if it applies universally) I think you are correct.
Our Australian site is site.com/order/ and has never had this problem. Our UK site is order.site.com and is the only site where we have noticed this occuring (i.e. sub-domain being treated as an entirely separate domain)
Google also ahs some good resources on this:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsDomains.html
This also might be useful if you want to adjust the analytics code as opposed to the site structure
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSite.html#domainSubDomains
Dylan
-
Thanks, Dylan. That's something to bear in mind if the client would be interested. But back to the original question: is this because store.example.com is a different subdomain? If it were example.com/store - would we be having this issue?
Thanks!
-
First touch tracking might assist in getting clearer analytics. We tested it in a similar situation and it did make things much clearer. Note that it isn't necessarily tracking the immediate referrer to the store or order page - but the first one.
Seomoz itself has a really good blog roundup on the process
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/first-touch-tracking-in-google-analytics
Cheers
Dylan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Bounce Rates: Leaving my domain.com/blog to shop on mydomain.com counts as bounce rate?
Hello! I have a kind of difficult question. On my main domain i have: Store: mydomain.com and wordpress blog on mydomain.com/blog If I have a link to a specific product on my blog and user goes to the product on the store, will bounce rate increase or as it's the same domain will be like a new page view? Different CMS's and blog is on a different analytics account than the store. I hope i could explain myself! Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | prozis0 -
Links On Expired Domains
Does anybody know if a link on an expired domain affects your SEO? I'm just asking because the SEO agency we used before used to create websites and then link to our company - very spammy. We have since ditched this agecny, however they wanted an extortionate amount to remove these links. Therefore, we decided to wait until these domains expired and then the links wouldn't exist. However, I am now completing a link audit and some of these sites are still appearing in the results (obtained from Link Research Tools) but I cannot access the links because the domains have expired. Can anyone help?
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0 -
Organic traffic vs. GWT data
Hi, how are you? I'm having a question becasue of an inconsistency between the data GWT gives and the one GA gives me. When I see the ammount of clics GWT tells me in february, it says 32850. When I go to Channels --> Organic Search, it says 51014. The difference is really big! Do you happen to know why this huge gap between data?
Reporting & Analytics | | arielbortz0 -
Tracking Goals on a Subdomain?
What needs to be done to Analytics to track goal completions on a subdomain? The main Analytics profile is set up for example.com, but landing pages for paid campaigns are set up at sub.example.com. Thank-you page is sub.example.com/thank-you.php What needs to be modified in Analytics (or to the Analytics code) or how do the goals need to be set up to track these subdomain conversions all within the same Analytics profile? They're not tracking currently. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | elcrazyhorse0 -
Will my Google sub domain filter work
Bon Pormeriggio from cloudy hot sticky & Humid Wetherby UK 😉 I have three sub domains which are reporting all the same stat traffic. Phase 1 is complete in that sub domain tracking has been configured in the analytics code for: http://en.lewispr.be/
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
http://fr.lewispr.be/
http://nl.lewispr.be/ But now i want to get traffic just from http://www.en.lewispr.be/ (Previously all three subdomains reported exactly the dame data). But its this stage I just want to double check. Ive set up a filter correcly as illustrated here:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/check-en-sub-domain-tracking_zps1b24f8af.jpg Will what ive done give me just traffic arriving at http://www.en.lewispr.be/ and not continue the problem of all three sub domains reporting exactly the same traffic?
Grazie tanto,
David0 -
Google Analytics shows wrong traffic source
I was reviewing out traffic sources on GA for this past week's traffic history, and noticed a couple of visits & conversions that GA cited as coming from campaigns from emails that were sent out in 2012 and early 2013. it seems odd that we would have traffic & conversions from these older campaigns - on a regular basis. it's not even from one campaign, but from multiple campaigns. is it possible that it is a cookie issue? - i wonder if these visits were really from the email campaigns - or if they were from organic searches or other sources. Thoughts? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | S.S.N0 -
Ideas for a strange surge in direct traffic
Being the type of person that can't stop checking my Google Analytics, I noticed this morning that between the hours of 12 and 2 central time last night I recieved a strange surge of direct traffic. My site typically gets around 40 direct visits per day (most of them coming during peak hours around the time people are getting off of work). I received 150 direct visits during this random time in the middle of the night. My bounce rate soared as almost every visit was a bounce. The visitors locations are spread out as if it is natural human traffic. Every single one of the visitors is using a chrome browser. Has anyone else run into something like this? All I can think of is that someone might have an addon or toolbar for chrome that linked to my site for a while in a way that caused unsuspecting visitors to end up on my page. For now I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the traffic doesn't return, as it could be bad news for my Adsense. *Edit: Also of particular interest, each direct visit went to an internal page on my site and no two of the 150 visits went to the same internal page. I also added an image showing a normal complete day's direct traffic and my direct traffic for today so far (The bulk of the surge came yesterday but the shot from today illustrates the surge better because it is missing my naturally daily direct traffic that comes in the afternoon) heXFb#LiiEr
Reporting & Analytics | | pattersonla0 -
GA Subdomain Setup
Hi Mozzers, Can someone show me how to add a subdomain profile (sub.example.com) under the master profile (www.example.com) on Google Analytics. I am not sure on how to set it up. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0