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Context

As the title mentions, I have two sites, one a subdomain of the other. To be clear:

Landing page (hosted on Webflow) - website.com

Application (hosted on Bubble.io) - app.website.com

Desired outcome

I want to have a better understanding of the usage patterns across both sites, especially as they go from website.com → app.website.com. In my head, this means one of two things:

  1. Two different Google Analytics properties/apps, where the sites give proper attribution to its referrer site
  2. One Google Analytics property/ app, where it recognizes the same user on both sites.

Situation

I messed something up trying to do 1. Now both properties only track website.com.

Two questions

  1. Among the two outcomes listed above, which is better, if any?
  2. Any guidance helping me resolve this? You'd be a lifesaver!

References

My Google Tag view

Manage Google Tags

Site A Google Tag

Site B Google Tag

I tried following the integration from the beginning, and resolving the errors shown in the screenshots.

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Well, yes, the approach you took is not necessarily wrong, but unconventional for sure. In vast majority of cases, you want to have one GA property covering all sites that at least share user journeys meaningfully from a landing page to a conversion. When possible, of course. Especially when different sites are just subdomains. It's important since Google tracks various ids in a domain-level cookie, so if the main domain doesn't change, it's all going to work just fine.

Multiple GA properties breaking a user journey in pieces only implies quite a bit of work to stitch them if you ETL the data to a better place, or different reports to consider separately on the same journey if you don't ETL the data.

It seems like you've implemented the tracking via Google Tag. It's not the best practice. It's better and cleaner to implement it via GTM, but Google Tag will work too if you don't need anything complex. So instead of having one google tag published on both sites, you chose to publish two different google tags and force one of them to report to two destinations, which is likely why you're seeing the same data in both properties.

I would suggest spending a bit more time figuring out how to set up this logic in GTM. It's simple enough, but gives you a lot more power over your tracking than gtag.

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2 Comments

Appreciate the guidance @BNazaruk, per your feedback I migrated over to GTM and seem to have gotten it working!
Great to hear that. It's still possible to do it all manually via gtag, but there's little sense to do that given how well GTM abstracts the gtag complexity from the user while still allowing the same functionality.
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Per @BNazaruk's guidance, I elected to go the GTM approach, and have one tag for both sites — or more like Desired outcome 2.

These are the two videos that I found most helpful:

  1. Google Tag Manager Tutorial - Getting Started (Plus The NEW Google Tag)
  2. How to Track Subdomains with Google Analytics 4
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