Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?

[debi_zyx]

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!

[Everett]

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

[debi_zyx]

Hi Dylan,

Thanks - that was very helpful.  I sent the link off to the site webmaster, so hopefully that will be taken care of.

[dylantovey]

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

[debi_zyx]

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!

[dylantovey]

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