CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptiframegoogle-analyticscross-domaintracking
cam8001
cam8001

Reputation: 1641

Running Google Analytics in iframe?

Our company runs a web site (oursite.com) with affiliate partners who send us traffic. In some cases, we set up our affiliates with their own subdomain (affiliate.oursite.com), and they display selected content from our site on their site (affiliate.com) using an iframe.

Example of a page on their site:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<iframe src="affiliate.example.com/example_page.html">
...content...
[google analytics code for affiliate.oursite.com]
</iframe>
[google analytics code for affiliate.com]
</body>
</html>

We would like to have Google Analytics tracking for affiliate.oursite.com. At present, it does not seem that Google is receiving any data from the affiliate when the page is loaded from the iframe.

Now, there are security implications in that Javascript doesn't like accessing information about a page in a different domain, and IE doesn't like setting cookies for a different domain.

Does anyone have a solution to this? Will we need to CNAME the affiliate.oursite.com to cname.oursite.com, or is there a cleaner solution?

Upvotes: 23

Views: 56936

Answers (4)

kgingeri
kgingeri

Reputation: 121

I found this YouTube for Google Analytic very helpful.
The web page can be found here: How to Track Conversions in Iframes with Google Tag Manager

Upvotes: 0

Greg
Greg

Reputation: 354

In the specific case of iframes, Google doesn't say much. I've been in the same situation but I'm glad I figured it out. I posted a walkthrough here. It's in French but you won't need to speak the language to copy / paste the code. Plus there's a demo file you can download.

Upvotes: 7

Silver Dragon
Silver Dragon

Reputation: 5560

  1. You have to append the Google Analytics tracking code to the end of example_page.html. The content between the <iframe> - </iframe> tag only displays for browsers, which do not support that specific tag.

  2. Should you need to merge the results from the subdomains, there's an excellent article on Google's help site: How do I track all of the subdomains for my site in one profile?

Upvotes: 15

Chris
Chris

Reputation: 553

Sorry, but it's not going to work. The reason is because Google Analytics uses first-party cookies. This means the cookies that GA sets are specific to the domain the code is on. In your case, the iFrame is on a third-party domain. This means you're going to have two sets of GA cookies (one set for each domain), and no real way to reconcile the data.

Upvotes: 6

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