How to enable cross-domain tracking setup in Zoho PageSense | User guide

Enable cross-domain tracking in PageSense

Cross-domain tracking is the process of tracking a visitor's journey across different domains to achieve a desired goal or action. For example, your user visits your website's homepage www.technology.com, clicks the blog tab on the page and is redirected to www.blogtechnology.com. 

If you don't enable cross-domain tracking, Zoho PageSense will consider a user to be two separate visitors accessing two different web pages. The user session that spans two domains (www.technology.com and blog.technology.com) will also be counted as two different sessions instead of a single session. This leads to incorrect visitor tracking data, which may affect the business decisions you make. 


If you enable cross-domain tracking, you will be able to view the actual path taken by the visitor across different domains and produce a cumulative report from all the domains they visit. In this case, the report will track visitors landing on your site and going to the blog section or any other section of your website or other microsites.


Enabling cross-domain tracking in Zoho PageSense 

You can enable or disable the cross-domain tracking setup for individual projects in Zoho PageSense as required. For example, you run an ecommerce store that uses multiple domains and you want to understand your customer's journey from the moment they land on your website, how they interact with browser items on the page, add products to their cart, and decide to make a purchase. In this case, enabling cross-domain tracking for your project will help provide a more comprehensive view of your buyers' journeys across your various domains, such as from the cart page www.shoppingcart.com to the payments page www.payments.com and track the following metrics for a visitor to your shopping site:

  1. Navigation path between different pages
  2. Total time on site as a sum of time spent on each page
  3. Number of individual sessions and unique sessions
  4. Number of unique users
  5. Whether users come from an organic search results, through a paid search, or from other referral websites or social media pages.

However, if you are concerned about staying compliant with increasingly strict privacy policies regarding tracking users' personal data, you can turn off this option at any time in PageSense and only track visitor information originating from a single business domain. 

To enable cross-domain tracking:
1. Choose the project you want to enable or disable cross-domain tracking for on your website.

2. Click the Snippet tab on the top bar and copy-paste your Project's code snippet code in the <head> tag of all the website domains where you want to run your experiment and track visitor information.

3. Click Project Settings in the top-right corner, select the Cross-Domain Tracking tab, and click the Allow Cross-Domain Tracking toggle button.
Once it is enabled, your experiments will capture your visitors' data continuously across all the domains or subdomains on your original site. 
By default, PageSense will have this option turned off for your projects.

  1. Cross-domain tracking is currently available for funnel analysis, form analytics, personalization, A/B testing, and split testing experiments in PageSense.
  2. Zoho PageSense uses first-party cookies (for the same domain) and third-party cookies (for cross domains) to identify and track every individual user coming to your website. Without a cookie to associate with the visitor, Zoho PageSense has no way of knowing that the visitor to the new domain is the same as the visitor from the previous domain. 
  3. Tracking visitors across different domains will not work if your visitors have blocked third-party cookies in their web browser, even if you enabled the cross-domain tracking setup in PageSense.