Cross domain tracking - Report per domain?

Question

I am implementing cross domain tracking for a client. We will be using Universal Analytics with Google Tag Manager.

Let's say the client has three domains: example.com, example.de and example.se. We would like to have a master account that tracks everything, but we would also like to be able to drill down and see a single domains stats. Perhaps this already exists without any customization but I have been unable to find anything on how though.

What I can see there are two ways to go about:

1. Create a filter that automatically appends the domain to the tracked data. So instead of /about in my view, I would get example.com/about and example.se/about. But how would this work with event tracking? Is it possible to get a report the way the client want's?

2. Use custom variables and dimensions. This way I could set up a variable for Domain and send in before tracking the data. But will it be sufficient to get the reports wanted?

Appreciate any help.

Thank you, Bjorn

Answer 1

Hostname ist already tracked, you can set it as second dimension to break down pageviews etc. by domain (works with events, too). However that is really cumbersome and most people follow the route you have outlined in Point 1. (Google suggest that themselves in their filter documentation) - however you'd still need hostname set as second dimension to break down by domain in the events report (or you create custom reports filtered by hostname for events for each domain).

Or you create segments based on hostname (since you can compare up to for segments that would allow you to compare the overall performance and domain performance).

Plus of course you can create additional views filtered by hostname and add the domain name only in the rollup-profile for all domains.

So there are several ways to do this somehow okay-ish, but nothing really better than the solutions you already came up with yourself.