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Level 2
September 7, 2023
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Other way to do cross domain tracking that doesn't involve query parameter in domain

  • September 7, 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 2470 views

Hi All,

 

Adobe's solution for cross domain tracking seems to be an output of attaching query parameter in the new destination domain / sub domain (e.g. https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/id-service/using/id-service-api/methods/appendvisitorid.html?lang=en)

 

Unfortunately our destination domain is somewhat stricter than others and it won't allow query parameter to be added by anything. I wonder if we can somehow pass this info into session storage or cookie and Adobe can ingest it from there? any idea?

 

 

 

Regards,

Felix

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Best answer by leocwlau

Visitor identification is not an easy task and is critical, it is indeed better to rely on Adobe's approach to avoid any issues.

Using session storage or cookies does not sound like a solution, as session storage for domain A and domain B are different, and you won't want to set a cookie at top ".com" level to pass data from domain A to domain B.

Actually, the query parameter is the approach to pass information from domain A to domain B with the least security concern. If your destination domain does not allow query parameters, I wonder if it will accept any other methods which are more risky.

4 replies

leocwlau
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
leocwlauCommunity Advisor and Adobe ChampionAccepted solution
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
September 7, 2023

Visitor identification is not an easy task and is critical, it is indeed better to rely on Adobe's approach to avoid any issues.

Using session storage or cookies does not sound like a solution, as session storage for domain A and domain B are different, and you won't want to set a cookie at top ".com" level to pass data from domain A to domain B.

Actually, the query parameter is the approach to pass information from domain A to domain B with the least security concern. If your destination domain does not allow query parameters, I wonder if it will accept any other methods which are more risky.

yuhuisg
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
September 7, 2023

If you're trying to track crossing from domainA.com to domainB.com, then neither session storage nor cookies would work for you because both can only be read/written from the same domain.

If you're trying to track crossing from subA.domainA.com to subB.domainA.com, then cross domain tracking is most likely not needed. Instead, you only have to ensure that ECID is available in both subdomains, and configure ECID to use domainA.com for its storage.

Jennifer_Dungan
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
September 8, 2023

In addition to the fantastic answers by @leocwlau and @yuhuisg; in most cases (Safari may not function this way), but in general, when I have tested multiple different domains in our infrastructure, without using any fancy cross domain parameters (in fact, I will open the sites in different tabs - not linking from within siteA to siteB), due to the Demdex cookie, I am set with the same ECID on all domains...

 

Again, this has a potential to fail due to 3-party cookie usage and the cookie-pocalypse... 

 

If you cannot pass query string params, I wonder if you have any way to do some sort of server-side custom solution. I hear what the others are saying about using Adobe's solution instead of your own.. but if it's not an option, its not an option... so you may have to think outside the box... it will be better than nothing,

 

One solution we did a few years agi (this was within the same site), but we created replication ECID server side cookies.. if the ECID cookie was lost/deleted, we would re-write it from the server side cookie. I wonder if there is something you can do to identify the user on your servers and use server side cookies to set first party cookies when the user comes to a site... or send the ECID on click as a post parameter that you can then set the cookies from upon entering the site.

Level 2
September 8, 2023

Thank you for the amazing answers and insights everyone, will have a think further on this one and see what can we do.