I have a site (mysite) that refers users to another (othersite). Tracking how many referrers mysite sends to the othersite is crucial. I have access to analytics for both.
On mysite, when a user clicks a link to othersite I trigger a Google Analytics Event. This should track how many referrers mysite sends to othersite.
That link has UTM tags to identify our traffic and campaign. In the othersite analytics, I review “acquisition/campaign” data for these UTM IDs. This should be the referrers received from mysite.
However, On othersite I only see 1/6th of the traffic I expect when compared to mysite’s events. I don't expect an exact match but that is a big difference.
I have tried many things to debug this and everything seems to work as intended.
- Initially, the links on mysite did not include UTM codes. At that time I reviewed the othersite's traffic by referring 'source'. Because of this discrepancy, we implemented the UTM tags to all links on mysite. The same discrepancy has persisted.
- I watch "real-time" analytics on both sites. I follow a link from mysite to othersite. I see one event on my site and one new hit in "traffic sources" on othersite. This is as expected and seems like everything is working properly.
- I use the JS console Analytics debugger too to watch the events and pageviews being sent to google analytics. I see one event on my site and a pageview that includes my UTM data on othersite. The only thing interesting here is othersite has two different Google Analytics codes and is sending this pageview hit to both. I don't think that is an issue.
I can’t explain this discrepancy. Any suggestions on how to debug or possible explanations?
Is there a better way to go about achiving my goal of "Tracking how many referrers mysite sends to the othersite"?
