Analytics count to redirected domain?

Question

I'm not pretty sure if this question is programming related, so I'm sorry if it's not.

The situation is like this. I have a domain (www.domain1.com for example). I would like to redirect all visitors that goes to www.domain1.com to my other domain(www.maindomain.com). www.domain1.com doesn't have any contents or page, so simply I can do dns redirect or whatever just to redirect the visitors to my domain. My question, is there a away that I can count the visitors through analytics or some sort that goes to www.domain1.com?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Answer 1

If you're using Google Analytics, you have a few options.

1. Rather than redirecting to www.maindomain.com, redirect to www.maindomain.com/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=domain1.com. This will show up in your reports as if the visit has originated from a referrer of 'domain1.com'. Perfect. However, this will overwrite any existing source/medium data attributed to that visitor... e.g., if they come from Google via organic search and enter via domain.com, they'll be reported as a referral from domain1.com rather than an organic visitor from Google.

2. Rather than redirecting to www.maindomain.com, redirect to www.maindomain.com/?redir=domain1.com. Use conditional logic in the page to determine if there's a value present for the redir value, and then use Google Analytics custom variables to create a session-level custom variable to identify and be able to flag/segment these visitors.

If you're using a different Analytics package, the solution should in theory be adaptable - you're either looking at utilising campaign tracking parameters to manually specify a source/channel, or you'll need to use conditional logic within the page to determine the source and output custom code/behaviour appropriately.

Good luck!