Building a flow diagram that tracks users across all my sites

[curtis_pond]

Hi,

I'm pointing five separate web sites (each a unique subdomain, such as site-a.company.com, site-b.company.com, etc.) to the same Report Suite ID to see if I can show popular journeys across the entire experience. For example: user begins their journey on Site A, goes to Site B, then Site E, then back to Site C. I'd like to see this journey via a Path Flow. At this stage of dev testing, all five sites share the same evar/prop for the dimensions I want to inspect (such as Page Name). Any reason why this can't be done in a Flow visualization (as long as I actually have test data to track)?

A bit of background: I referred to this doc to determine the best approach for combining data to tell a holistic story of our "web experience" (i.e., the five sites). https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/prepare/global-rs.html?lang=en. Thanks for any guidance or shared experiences

-Curtis

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

So long as this is a shared suite, and using Experience Cloud IDs... this should be doable.. the amount of pathing you have may make the report quite large, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

However, if you are using "Page Name" this will be filled with all the pages on Site A, and all the Pages on Site B, etc....

If you are just trying to see users moving between sites, you might be better off looking at a dimension that just tracks the site domain (I use my server variable for this, but it could easily be any prop or eVar)... but then you could limit that flow to just users moving between sites without all the page variations complicating the report.

[curtis_pond]

Hey @Jennifer_Dungan! As usual, thank you much for the help! I do have Experience Cloud IDs enabled, although I need to do some more research around that extension. Great suggestion on the server variable. I do have that variable enabled as well. Thanks again, this was the quick gut check that I needed. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're welcome. I have a similar setup in my own implementation

[curtis_pond]

About the Experience Cloud ID extension...anything you learned about the setup and customization you can share to make it easier to do this type of tracking on the reporting side? I installed the extension, but haven't done much tinkering at this point (and going through the docs). 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Here is what I do... I have tracking servers set up for each domain... s.domain1.com; s.domain2.com, etc... so I set up a "lookup" data element to set the proper variant per site.

Then I use another data element to set my cookie domain per site, so that the cookies are set first party.

Then I also make sure to set secureCookie to true.

(my implementation is a few years old, I may need to do some updates myself, but so far its working)

I use Lookup Table Utility for my lookup variables:

it should be noted.. if you have old s_vi cookies (if you are transitioning) I believe Adobe will defer to those over the ecid.... but those should transition out slowly, and Adobe should map the old cookies to the new.

You should also test, using something like Incognito, that you get the same ecid when you visit your sites; as long as you don't close the browser you should see the same ecid on each of your sites.. you can do this on your main browser as well, and see how the transition handles

[curtis_pond]

Thanks @Jennifer_Dungan ! Super valuable information and much appreciated.