The Challenge 


This plan was prepared and implemented for a company that was previously tracking its domain and subdomains (about 30, in 6 different languages and markets) in different Google Analytics accounts. The existing Analytics settings showed the following issues:

1) Conversions funnels (account registrations) started from various subdomains and ended in a “thank you” page in the main domain. For this reason, they could not set up funnels and goals, hence they could not track conversions across different subdomains.
2) Traffic from subdomains to the main domain was tracked in the GA account of the main domain as new/returning traffic, inflating the actual number of visits to the website (and its subdomains).
3) Visitors who left the main domain to go to subdomains and vice versa were counted as exits or bounces.
4) Google Analytics was not updated to Universal Analytics.

At the same time, the company was in the process of moving to new domain and subdomains' names across all its websites - i.e. from www.olddomainname.com to www.newdomainname.com and from subdomain.olddomainname.com to subdomain.newdomainname.com.
Some of the company’s subdomains had up to 2 million visits per month.

Old GA settings:

google analytics

The Solution 


1) I created a new Account and updated it to Universal Analytics. This also allowed to keep intact historical data from the old account.
2) I set up sub-domain tracking to track main domain and all subdomains. I implemented the same UA code across domain and subdomains, using the company’s internal tools to place Google Analytics code in the webpages.
3) I created a view for each subdomain:

google analytics

5) I created an unfiltered view to collect and store raw data from all the company’s websites.
6) I created a view to track conversion goals only, and added a filter to exclude all query parameters from the URLs in order to create clean reports.

google analytics

7) In the Conversions Goals view, I created funnels to track several conversion goals. In particular the company's main KPI was registrations to the website, coming from different subdomains.  

google analytics  


Results


1) Funnels are now being used to track drop rate across the funnel's pages:

google analytics
2) Conversions rate from different sources/mediums are being tracked by looking the reports in the Conversion Goal View (excluding query parameters) - Behaviour Tab, showing Landing pages and adding Sources as secondary dimensions  

google analytics