You can still track your visitors in Google Analytics as they switch between your domains. Have you linked Google Analytics to your Google Tag Manager and your Stager ticket shop? Then you can set up cross-domain tracking. Cross-domain means you can continue to recognize a traffic source when switching between domains.
Suppose your visitor arrives at your website via Facebook and then clicks through to the ticket shop to buy a ticket. You can see in Google Analytics that this visitor came via Facebook.
What is cross-domain tracking?
Your website is your primary domain. Your Stager ticket shop is your secondary domain: data there is your data, but it comes in through a Stager ticket shop. If you enter your primary domain in your GTM, we will ensure that everything your visitors do in your Stager ticket shop is also passed on to Analytics, without you losing sight of your visitors. So you can keep following what they are doing on both websites and you can see the whole path they have gone through.
How does that happen?
By means of cookies. Your website gives each visitor a unique ID that is stored in the cookie. This cookie is carried from your website to your Stager ticket shop and (possibly) back again. Normally, websites on one domain cannot access cookies set for another domain. But with cross-domain tracking you catch this and in fact you give permission to both websites to communicate with each other about the cookies.
Why is it useful?
Because it gives you insight into the steps your ticket buyers take. You can see at what point visitors drop out, and you can approach them with tailored advertisements. To learn more, read the articles about advertising with Google ads and advertising with Facebook.
How do you set up cross domain tracking?
Do you use an integrated ticket shop on your own website? Setting up cross-domain tracking will work differently. Read more here.
No rocket scientist needed: this is already set up for you in the Google Tag Manager container. Of course, you must link your GTM and Stager, and upload the Google Tag Manager container in your GTM account.
Please make sure the Google Tag Manager script is added to your own website. This requires some knowledge of programming. We do not recommend you doing this yourselves unless you have development skills. Ask your developer.
The only thing you have to do is:
Go to the Main domain and enter the URL of your own website. The cross-domain tracking itself has already been set up, so that your site is automatically linked to the Stager site. A domain never has a prefix like www. or https:// and looks like stager.co for example.
Make sure the Google Ads Conversion Linker is added to your Google Tag Manager to make your cross-domain tracking work in Google Ads as well.
Read below how to do this.
1. Linking domains
Go to the container in Google Tag Manager and click on 'Variables' and open the 'Ticketshop - GA4' variable.
Then log in to your Google Analytics 4 account, select the property of your ticket shop and click on 'Administrator' at the bottom left.
In the right hand column, click on ‘Data streams’ and select the domain of your ticket shop.
Copy the measurement ID at the top right of the page. See the image below as an example.
Go back to Google Tag Manager and replace G-XXXXXXXXXX with the measurement ID that you copied into Google Analytics 4. Press ‘Save’.
Go back to the overview in Google Analytics 4. Scroll down and click on ‘More settings for tagging’.
Then click on ‘Configure your domains’ and enter your own domain and stager.nl. Press 'Save'.
2. Set up Conversion Linker for cross-domain tracking
The Conversion Linker ensures a conversion is linked to the correct domain. You link your main domain to your ticket shop. This is already set in the container. All that remains to be done is to fill in the correct domains. This is necessary to prevent the cookies from being deleted before cross-domain tracking can take place:
Go to the container in Google Tag Manager and click on 'Variables' and open the 'Main domain' variable.
Replace XXXXX with the domain of your ticket shop and press ‘Save’.