cross-domaingoogle-analytics-4

How does GA4 come up with cross domain suggestions, and why am I getting gwern.net suggested?


Today I was digging around for a way to block certain domains in GA4 (ultimately I went with a trigger in GTM instead), when I came across the "Configure your domains" menu. It suggested a few domains I recognize, mainly our own dev environments, but then also gwern.net.

I'm curious, does anyone know how GA4 comes up with it's suggestions, and why this gwern.net domain would even pop up? I did some light Googling about the site and it seems to be tied to someone who writes about the darknet, nootropics and crypto (the site I work on has nothing to do with any of these topics, and we definitely don't link to that persons site).


Solution

  • It probably just selects hits that came in into this property having a hostname that is not in the list of cross-domain tracking hostnames.

    Why did gwern get there? GA spam could be one thing. Maybe someone was testing something there and sent a few hits to your property? I frequently test foreign GTM containers on sites they're not supposed to fire on. I also frequently test things, setting some random measurement ids. I'm sure others do this stuff from time to time.

    There's also a way to open a site from a different domain, either by manipulating cnames or local dns records. Maybe one of your front-end devs has this site as a side-project and mixed up their local dns settings, opening your site from gwern's domain. There are many ways for a network request to end up with wrong data.