[GA4] Enabling cross-domain tracking in GA4

How to enable cross-domain visitor tracking for non-branded domains.

Updated over a week ago

Cross-domain visitor tracking in iPaper

If you’re tracking to an existing GA4 property, and you would like to be able to follow your visitors from a Flipbook to your website, or vice versa, there are a few extra steps you need to take to enable this excellent feature.

NB: If you're using a branded domain, and serving your iPaper publications from a subdomain (Example: Catalogs.YourWebsiteDomain.com), you can skip this guide entirely. This is because Google Analytics tracks sessions across subdomains by default when using their tracking script.

Check-list for setting up cross domain tracking with GA4.

✅ All websites must be set up using the same GA4 property (G-XXXXXXX.)

✅ Cross domain tracking must be configured in GA4 Admin.

NB: There is no need to configure the referral exclusion list as this is handled automatically in GA4.

Setting up cross-domain tracking

Log in to your GA4 account

Navigate to Admin:

In the Property section, select Data Streams:

Next, select More Tagging Settings:

From the More Tagging Settings page, select Configure your domains:

From this page, add your domains, as seen here:

With this now in place, your Flipbook visitors will now be tracked across domains, and will be seen as the same visitor when they hit your domain.

💡 You can confirm this by looking at the URL when linking between your catalog and your website. As soon as you set up an external link from the catalog, the URL will be appended with a query string, similar to this one:

?_gl=1%2Aic6dto%2A_ga%2AMTM2ODE5NTg0Ny4xNjM3MTY1MjQy%2A_ga_ESMSE9YE01%2AMTY0MjE5OTgxMS40LjEuMTY0MjE5OTg1My4w

This shows that cookie information can be passed from your catalog to your website. The very same thing should happen when you link from your website to the catalog.

We hope you found this guide helpful! 😀

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