CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analyticscross-domain
Simon Breton
Simon Breton

Reputation: 2876

Google analytics server side attribution and gclid, how does it works?

I've learned that when setting-up a cross-domain tracking with Google Ads linked to GA the gclid is not actually passed from DomainA to DomainB. But instead, the gclid is attributed to the session with some kind of "Google analytics server side attribution".

However, reading the google documentation I'm understanding something else :

If you follow these steps, the GCLID from the Google Analytics cookie will automatically be read

So how does this work exactly? How is the gclid information being passed in a cross-domain situation?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 833

Answers (1)

kgrg
kgrg

Reputation: 1633

In Google Analytics, users are tracked by a cookie within a browser (clientId), which is by default unique to a website, generated randomly at the first visit us the user. All pageviews and events (hits) are sent to Google Analytics servers, where it gets processed, and Google Analytics determines which hits belong together, forming a session. As you can notice, you don't need to pass UTM or GCLID parameters to all pageviews within a session, so that they all belonged to the same session and session source, as Analytics will treat consequitive hits without a new traffic source belonging to the same session. (Further rules can apply for session definition.)

Cross domain tracking means, that the clientId is passed from domain A to the pages on domain B and vice versa, so that Google Analytics would be aware, that this user is the same on both sites, and an existing clientId should be used, instead of generating a new one. Therefore, if the same visitor is identified, the behavior described above applies: it will apply the last known traffic source to page views on both domains.

This is the reason, why a properly set up cross domain tracking will not need passing UTM or GCLID parameters among the domains. (However, clientId will be passed instead.)

Upvotes: 1

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