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Cross-domain / subdomain tracking in GA?

Reporting & Analytics

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FPD_NYC Subscriber Banned last edited by

Hi there,

My client has a site website.com and a booking engine, booking.website.com

They are currently tracking the main site and the booking subdomain as two separate properties in the same GA account. The issue is we can't see where users are originating on the subdomain property; it's all being counted as referral.

My understanding is we need to set up subdomain tracking using Google Tag Manager in order for GA to pass the user data between the two subdomains.

This is fine, except for this one line I am reading on Google's guide to cross-domain tracking:

Subdomains

If you have updated your tracking code to analytics.js, then no additional configuration is required to track subdomains.

You can use cross domain tracking to collect data from a primary domain, like www.example.com, and a subdomain, like www.subdomain.example.com, in a single Analytics account property.

That last line makes it sound like we should be using cross-domain tracking for this purpose.

Are we correct in setting up subdomain tracking and NOT cross-domain tracking to be able to track users across subdomains on the same domain?
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