CVPA has a set of calendar websites/domains which provide calendar functionality that would be difficult to implement on their main websites:
- cfa.calendar.gmu.edu
- hylton.calendar.gmu.edu
- music.calendar.gmu.edu (not yet active)
Although this calendar functionality is spread across multiple domain names, the calendar website(s) match the look and feel of their related websites, and they, along with their main websites, are intended to represent a single website experience. As such, the analytics data from the calendar websites now feeds into the GA properties of their related websites. This makes it easier to track and reports on user activity across both the main website and its related calendar website.
But, since we now have data from more than one domain name feeding into the same GA property, we need to do something to distinguish hits from each domain name. The website property, which had previously been for a single website, is now essentially a roll-up property.
We could simply prepend the hostname for each hit onto the hit’s request URI, as one would typically do with a roll-up property (so a hit from the About page would show up in GA as cfa.gmu.edu/about instead of just /about), but this would mean that all pages being tracked in the GA property would be listed differently going forward (as they would now include the hostname). This would make it harder to do date range comparisons in Google analytics to compare the performance of pages over time. There are ways that could be dealt with, but it would add complexity to the reporting process.
Instead, we used an advanced filter to implement the prepending of the hostname as described above, but only for hits from the calendar websites. Hits from the main website will continue to be collected with no change as to how they are listed.
The analytics data for each of these websites continues to also send its data to the CVPA roll-up and the university roll-up.