Google Analytics, iframes & cross-domain

Question

I have GA on every page on one domain (actually not me, but my company, whose programmer needs auditing). Just the default code (Classic version, ga.js), no special accommodations whatsoever that I've seen or know of. Bare minimal if any configuration past registering the service with the main site...

All the pages are either aspx or static HTML. It's common practice for this guy to embed pages on the site within other pages on the site in iframes, where both the parent (top-level) & child (embedded) pages contain the GA script.

I don't really know much at all about GA, have never worked with it, but I do suspect that might result in extra hits being counted by GA or something, that that may be messing with the metrics. But then I've read stuff about GA using first-party cookies so by default pages loaded in iframes won't be tracked/counted... I could really use some clarification on this, please.

Then our programmer frames pages from the main site in pages on other sites that we own, that are on different domains. So then there's this cross-domain business, with no segregation of sources, because they really don't care much. So what should be the outcome of that? The external sites' pages don't have the GA code.

However, we're rebuilding one of those other sites - actually I am, for the most part - and the programmer told me to just copy and paste the same exact GA script used on the main site into that one. So, it's a different domain. That wouldn't work as-is, would it? Wouldn't there have to be some sort of special configuration, setting of the domain, something?

I'd really appreciate if someone could tell me more about the scenarios described above. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In the Google Analytics developer menu, you can create a new 'profile' for this new site. The analytics will then be tracked for just that one site, not for all. In theory, it is possible to use one GA.js for all your sites, but it kind of kills the whole concept of Google Analytics, so it's not recommended.

Answer 2

Your really shouldn't be using iframes anymore IMO. There are reasons to use them like embedding code for tracking etc, I think, even GA uses iframes. But, generally Google doesn't like them because a lot of spammers use them to try and fool the Google Crawler.

Also, it get's very complicated to understand what is going on within GA.

To answer your question: Each iframe is like an independent webpage completely separated from the other webpage (for security reasons). So when Google or a web browser goes to your website it will do this:

1. Load your main html document.
2. Render that page.
3. See that you have an iframe.
4. Load that page in the iframe.
5. Render the iframe.

Now, if you don't have GA installed on the iframe page it will not track the page being loaded.

But if you do put GA in the iframe it will record when the iframe is loaded or the webpage is loaded.

But, remember that one of the main reasons of having GA is to see where your customers are coming from and why. If you have an iframe of another webpage, you really don't know if that is because a customer is:

A) visiting your website from the page directly. OR B) the customer is visiting that page through an iframe on another page.

It can get very complicated

You must generate a new tracker for each domain you are using. Otherwise what is to stop someone from just copying your GA code, and putting it on their webpage.