Iframe

Updated 25 May 2021: Added information about using this with GA4. As Google Analytics 4 does not have a mechanism to disable cookie storage, only the second solution (send dataLayer events from iframe to the parent) described in this article will work for GA4.

Here I am, back with <iframe> and cross-domain tracking. I’ve published a couple of articles before on the topic, with my upgraded solution being the most recent one. These articles tackle the general problem of passing the Client ID from the parent to the <iframe>.

**Last updated 18 September 2020: Due to how most browsers now have third-party cookie protections in place, this solution will be very ineffective going forwards. You should instead take a look at a cookieless solution.

Some years ago, I wrote a post on how to track cross-domain iframes when using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. That solution relied on hitCallback to decorate the iframe, and now that I look back on it, it has its shortcomings.

NOTE! This solution has been upgraded, and the new approach can be found here.

If you’re unfamiliar with the lingo, cross-domain tracking is a hack used by Google Analytics to circumvent the web browser’s same-origin policy. Essentially, the policy dictates that browser cookies can only be shared with a parent domain and all its sub-domains. In other words, domainA.com and domainB.com do not share cookies.

Since Google Analytics calculates sessions and users by using a cookie, this is problematic. If the user navigates from domainA.com to domainB.com, they will, by default, browse domainB.com in a different session (often a different user as well) from that on domainA.com.