Google Analytics Site Search to new sub-domain
-
Hi Mozzers,
I'm setting up Google's Site Search on a website. However this isn't for search terms, this will be for people filling in a form and using the POST action to land on a results page. This is similar to what is outlined at http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012264 ('<a class="zippy zippy-collapse">Setting Up Site Search for POST-Based Search Engines').</a>
However my approach is different as my results appear on a sub-domain of the top level domain. Eg..
- user is on www.domain.com/page.php
- user fills in form
- submits
- user gets taken to results.domain.com/results.php
The issue is with the suggested code provided by Google as copied below..
Firstly, I don't use query strings on my results page so I would have to create an artificial page which shouldn't be a problem. But what I don't know is how the tracking will work across a sub-domain without the _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.domain.com']); code. Can this be added in? Can I also add Custom Variables?
Does anyone have experience of using Site Search across a sub-domain perhaps to track quote form values?
Many thanks!
-
Don't know if you still need help with this, but here goes...
The main problem is that article you reference is showing out of date Google Analytics tracking code. The _setDomainName piece that you reference is from the asynchronous version of the tracking code. The code shown in the article is from the previous version of the GA tracking code. If you try to mix code from the two different versions, it won't work.
That article is basically just describing how to create a virtual page view that includes the search term the user has searched for. With the asynchronous code, it would look like:
You would need to update the code above with your own UA ID, domain and replace the 'SearchTerm' placeholder programmatically with whatever the user entered.
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
-
Google Analytics Automated Reporting
HI all, I tend to do a big reporting powerpoint deck using screenshots from google analytics and tables I create year end and mid year. It's like an 80 page report for the 10 webisite swe have and then I go ahead and make annotations as I see from the data. That being said this can take a lot of time, up to a 40 hours of time to pull it all together or more which is challenging when you have daily meetings. Anyhow, I've looked into automating and tried a couple things: 1. Tableau- but it keeps crashing and seems tedious 2. Dashlane and supergrabber- seem a bit tedious to set up too. Anyone have ideas on how to better shar ereporting in the organization in this type of format for a website (websites)? Organic, paid, traffic, etc. Laura
Reporting & Analytics | | lauramrobinson322 -
How to FILTER in Google Analytics an ad campaign from linkedin?
Hi mozzers We are setting up an a linkedin ad campaign for our agency and want to track its traffic and conversions. The linkedin ad will carry UTMs for each link. For tracking this campaign accurately I thought about creating a new GA View with a specific filter. So my question is about the filtering, should i use the INCLUDE, REFERRAL with pattern LINKEDIN.COM (see image)? if not what would be the best way to track this campaign? My other concern is that we are also running other a job ad on linkedin and I feel these hits will be tracked as well. Is there a way to separate those 2 campaigns? Thanks guys! MzE5hqE.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google Analytics: Okay to change domain?
So, we are a long time user of GA and we're planning a domain change.
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0823
Does anyone know if I can 'change the domain' in GA so we don't lose our past data?
Thanks!0 -
Is it possible to use Google Tag Manager to pass a user’s text input into a form field to Google analytics?
Hey Everyone, I finally figured out how to use auto event tracking with Google Tag Manager, but didn't get the data I wanted. I want to see what users are typing into the search field on my site (the URL structure of my site isn't set up properly to use GA's built-in site search tracking). So, I set up the form submit event tracking in Google Tag Manager and used the following as my event tracking parameters: Category: Search Action: Search Value When I test and look in Google Analytics I just see: "search" and "search value." I wanted to see the text that I searched on my site. Not just the Action and Category of the event.... Is what I'm trying to do even possible? Do I need to set up a different event tracking parameter? Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | DaveGuyMan0 -
Google Analytics & Omniture Discrepancies
I am seeing a significant difference between my traffic numbers in Google Analytics and Omniture (Omniture has significantly more). I do not expect them to report exactly the same numbers but these are just too far off. Any idea why that is, or which one I should trust more? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | emediaSEO0 -
How do I keep the SEOmoz bot from showing up in my Google Analytics?
I noticed today that we had a huge spike in visits on December 9th of this month. We are talking like 13,000 more visits. The network the visits were from was psinet inc. Any suggestions on how to keep these bots from registering in my Google Analytics? Is there an ip address I can exclude?
Reporting & Analytics | | Hosmercars0 -
Omniture vs Google Analytics
What's your opinion on analytics tools? Specifically Omniture vs Google Analytics. Is Omniture really that much more powerful than GA? Have you used GA Premium, the enterprise package? My main question - Can GA (free or premium) do everything that Omniture can? If GA Premium and Omniture were the same price, which would you choose? Is one harder to implement, pull reports, tweak, ect? Thanks in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | akim260 -
Individual or Separate Google Analytics Accounts for Each Country Location?
We have 3 websites. USA, Germany and UK. Currently our analytics account is set up with 1 account with each domain as a Profile. I am wondering if I would see more accurate results if I have them set up individually, under the same Google account, but different Analytic accounts. The reason I wonder is because I noticed when I was going through setting this up, it asked for each Country Time Zone for each domain. I was not sure if this was for me to see the times, or if this was to provide more accurate data. Maybe this is just a personal preference topic?
Reporting & Analytics | | hfranz0