Now let's talk briefly about tracking code customizations than many
customizations that you can make to the tracking code. And it's really really
powerful feature to alter the data that is collected on a code level.But there's
a little bit of an overkill for a basic installations but I want to touch on
three very important points here that I see are made often as mistakes. And
please pay attention they might not be very relevant to the account that you
are setting up but if you ever have a client who maybe has more than one page
then there might be cross-domain tracking required. If your site is being
set up in European countries, you might want to turn on anonymize IP. And if
you're interested in getting very good data on demographics such as age or
interest you might want to alter the code to include demographics and
interest data. So let's take a look on how this would be set up.
Cross-domain Tracking what does Cross-domain Tracking mean? This is a
website of one of my old clients once you are on his page he has a lot of
content on his page but he also has a premium button here. And once you click
that you go over to a completely different domain. But we want to be able
to track that within Google Analytics account. And so we installed cross-domain
tracking on this page. And we can see that it's installed because we have this
parameter in the back here which tells us that the session was transferred. And
if you don't have cross-domain tracking setup on this page, Google wouldn't
recognize this user as just clicked on from the main page to this premium page.
But rather as two different users which can mess up the whole analysis that we
do in the backend because we won't be able to identify for example the source
that the user came from when he came to this page and maybe bought
something. So it's very advisable to set up cross-domain tracking in this case so
if you have a client that has multiple domains and you want to track this in
one Google Analytics account you need to set up cross-domain tracking. And this is
really a customization of the code so beneath the Google Analytics code you
would add these following parameters so the site's actually linked. When you are
in Google tag manager, you have the configurations within the tag. So under
more settings you have cross-domain tracking and you'll be able to configure
across the main tracking at this point. So please check that out if this applies
to your client. Next up Anonymize IP. Anonymize IP is a feature that Google
introduced in 2010 because there were some privacy concerns surrounding Google
Analytics. Basically what it will do is anonymize the last part of the IP so
Google won't be able to go back and identify the user based on the IP. We
can't see that data in Google Analytics anyways. But for companies that are set
up within the European Union they might want to enable this feature to avoid any
legal trouble with the use of Google Analytics. And it's pretty easy to do all
you need to do is append this little line to your Google Analytics code and
it will anonymize the IP. Lastly let's talk about demographics and interests.
Now demographics and interest is a report within Google Analytics so if you
go to the reporting tab you will find under audience and demographics that you
can enable that to see very awesome data such as the category or the age group or
the gender of who is visiting your site. Now this works through
double-click data that Google has gathered and it requires you to change
your Google Analytics code. So first of all you need to enable that. We will
click on enable within the reporting view and then you need to change the
Google Analytics tracking installation. So this is one time one code to change
so I can look that up here in this Help section. Right here we just need to
add this line of code to our whole Google Analytics script require display features.
I would recommend to turn this on for any client only if he doesn't want his data
to be surveyed and taken into consideration for finding out these
demographic features. You might want to leave that out as a customization for
your tracking installation.