Sites and domains

A number of factors influence how you configure the tracking of sites and domains. For example, these could be the company's regional separation or aggregation strategy or the purpose of collecting of data. To demonstrate different tracking scenarios, let's assume that you have multiple sites with multiple domains and sub-domains, for example for different regions, languages, and audiences.

When you are working with multiple websites in one Sitefinity CMS instance, you can choose which specific Sitefinity CMS sites to track. For example, you may want to exclude from your data a subset of sites that are not relevant to your marketing department's current goals, ensuring results data is not diluted. In addition, you can isolate customer journey data for individual websites in specific data centers in Sitefinity Insight.

For more information, see Data centers and data sources.

The following sections summarize the key tracking scenarios, along with examples and setup guidelines.

Track sites separately in dedicated data centers for each tracked site when you have marketing scenario with characteristics, similar to the following:

• Legislation constraints and requirements for different regions.
• Separation of concern, campaigns, budgets, and goals.
• Small or no overlap of visitors browsing the sites.
• Different business focus on the sites.

What you do is when configuring the Sitefinity Insight connector for a Sitefinity CMS instance, you select a dedicated data center for each Sitefinity CMS site on the instance. For more information, see Connect to Sitefinity Insight.

In some scenarios, you track sites together in one data center. Some factors that are in favor of this scenario are the following:

• Get clear overview of marketing metrics on company level rather than on site level.
• Significant overlap of visitors browsing the sites.
• Similarity of content, structure, and functionality of the sites.
• Track interactions of visitors across websites, hosted on multiple domains.

The three use cases, in which you track sites or sub-domains together are the following:

IMPORTANT: In all three cases, you need to connect to data from a single data source, otherwise data collected from multiple data sources is not merged properly.

• You have multiple sites accessible as sub-routes of a domain. This scenario works out-of-the-box.
  For example, www.example.com/site1 and www.example.com/site2.
• You have multiple sites accessible as sub-domains of a domain. This scenario requires additional configuration.
  For example, en.example.com and nl.example.com.
  For more information, see Track data client-side » Sub-domain tracking.
• You have multiple sites accessible as entirely different domains. This scenario requires custom implementation.

For more information about data sources, see Data sources.