Broken links in content reports when tracking subdomains with Google Analytics

Posted by Rob Sobers on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Rob Sobers
Published on 2011-11-22T03:10:06Z Indexed on 2011/11/22 10:28 UTC
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I have a tracking code that I use on my main site and my blog, which is on a subdomain:

  • www.example.com
  • blog.example.com

I have a single profile in Google Analytics. I use advanced segments to look at traffic to the main site vs. traffic to the blog.

Problem 1:

When I'm browsing my content reports under Standard Reporting, the "Page" column doesn't show the top-level or sub-domain, so I can't differentiate www.example.com/index.html from blog.example.com/index.html easily.

According to the docs, this filter is supposed to make GA prepend the hostname to the page URL in your content reports, but it doesn't seem to work.

Problem 2:

When I click on the little "Open in new window" icon next to a given page in a content report line, it always assumes the page lives on www.example.com, so I get 404s when the page is actually on blog.example.com.

Is there a good solution for these subdomain tracking problems?

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