Multiple domains to one payment sub-domain in Google Analytics

[panini]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a series of sites (~25) that are all regional e-commerce sites with the same URL structure eg. www.[region]-product.com as well as a 'master' site (eg www.product.com). I also have a single Adwords PPC account which point to all of the regional sites as well as the master site. As part of the payment/checkout process you only ever get taken to a sub domain of the master site (eg payment.product.com).

My question is: Is it wise to use the single PPC Adwords account to set up an Analytics account under which I list all of the regional sites and the master site? Once that's done I'm not entirely sure how I can track sales from a regional site to the payment process of the master site and have sales correctly assigned to the right domain. On the payment process I can only use one site ID tracking code so I'm not even sure I can correctly assign a transaction to a single site if multiple sites use the same payment pages.

Example:

Visit to region-product.com > Quote form submitted to payment.product.com > Payment completed on payment.product.com > Sale is assigned to which domain?

Can anyone who understands what I'm trying to achieve comment on the plausibility of this?

Many many thanks!

[panini]

Hi magicrob,

Thanks for your reply.

In this instance would I want the sub-domain I use for payments only to be treated as a separate account than the top level domain it belongs to? From there I could track referring domains to that payment sub-domain and use your report to show where the sales came from.

Thanks!

[magicrob]

Hi

A quick way to track where sales are coming from is to setup a custom report tracking conversion by source/medium which includes referring domains, as long as the GA profile for your payment website records ecommerce transaction information.

Here's one I made earlier...

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=ATrvKC0LQrWXPcVWHueJTQ

Make sure you're logged into the correct GA account and can apply the report to the correct profile.

Note that GA favours last-click attribution, meaning that they will credit the last place the customer visited before converting as responsible for the sale, which in this case should be your referring sites.