noun · analytics

Cross-domain tracking

Cross-domain tracking lets analytics follow one visitor across two or more domains as a single session, instead of counting them as a new visitor on each site.

In practice

It matters most when checkout or booking happens somewhere else, like a hotel’s booking engine or a separate app domain. Without it, the session breaks at the handoff and the sale gets credited to “direct” instead of the ad or search that earned it. In GA4 you set it up by listing your domains in the Google tag settings.

Not to be confused with

Cross-device tracking, which tries to connect the same person across a phone and a laptop.