The situation:
I'm using SiteCatalyst for a website on www.my-company.com. The website also 'contains' a number of pages that are on an entirely separate domain www.about-my-company.com. The look and feel of these pages is exactly the same as the pages on the www.my-company.com, so as far as the user is concerned, it is the same website. In SiteCatalyst we would like to report page views and conversions that take place on the separate domain as if they were on the main website (and thus being part of one visit/session).
How it works in Google Analytics
I have a Google Analytics background and there it is refered to as 'cross domain tracking'. 'Cross Domain Tracking' in Google Analytics basically breaks down to this:
1) Whenever the user follows a link from domain A to domain B, all the cookie information (including the session cookie) is passed to domain B using the query string.
2) A piece of javascript on the page on domain B interprets this URL, and writes the information to cookies (including a session cookie). The session is thus maintained allthough the user went from domain A to domain B.
My question:
Is this possible with SiteCatalyst as well, and if so how? I've been looking for documentation on this issue and I have the feeling I can't find it because it's either very easy or nearly impossible.
What I've found so far:
The only thing that sounds remotely like what I want to achieve is this:
...it is more likely that you would like to treat www.abc-rocks.com as though it is no different than www.abc.com. To accomplish this, SiteCatalyst provides an Internal URL Filters area in the admin console.
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/admin-console-tips-inside-omniture-sitecatalyst/
However, I don't see how some setting in the SiteCatalytist interface can help visitors 'maintain their session'.
Any help would be appreciated, Thanks!
The quick and easy way to do it is to use a friendly third party cookie for both sites. For example, if you have www.about-my-company.com and www.my-company.com both using the tracking server of metrics.other-company.com, then any navigation across the various domains will maintain that same session for that visitor. The s.trackingServer value is where the visitor ID cookie will be set from.
Now if you are using first party cookies for each site, then you will have a problem. For example if www.about-my-company.com uses the tracking server of metrics.about-my-company.com and www.my-company.com uses the tracking server of metrics.my-company.com, then you are going to register a new session when that visitor crosses domains. Adobe currently does not have a published solution for this. I have seen some hacky solutions out there that do work, but none of them I would feel too comfortable in recommending.
Anytime a link gets clicked on your site, there is functionality in the s_code.js file that will check to see if any of the items listed in s.linkInternalFilters variable appear in that clicked link URL. If a value from the s.linkInternalFilters variable is found in the clicked URL then it is considered to be internal navigation, and nothing additional will happen. If none of the items listed in the s.linkInternalFilters variable are found in the clicked link's URL, then the code assumes that the visitor is leaving the site and an exit link call will fire. That's the only thing the s.linkInternalFilters variable is used for.
For every beacon that comes into SiteCatalyst, they will typically contain a current URL value, and a referring URL value. The values you enter into the Internal URL Filters in the admin console will be checked against the referring URL value from the beacon. If there is no match, then SiteCatalyst will consider that to be an external referrer, and its value will be used in the Referrers and Referring Domains report. That's the only thing the Internal URL Filters are used for.