google analytics - multiple trackers on one page (cookie conflict)

javascript cookies google-analytics widget
Kuba Suder picture Kuba Suder · Aug 6, 2009 · Viewed 59.1k times · Source

I'm writing a web application that's supposed to be embedded in other people's websites (kind of a widget). I'm using Google Analytics to track all the people that visit all instances of my script on the embedding websites. The problem is that I don't know how to use it so that it doesn't interfere with those websites' own Google Analytics accounts. I'm storing the tracker variable in a namespace, so I thought that should do it, but I haven't realized that GA stores its settings in cookies (__utma, __utmz etc.), and those cookies are used by both trackers, if there are two of them on the same page... So for example if I use _setVar to store some kind of user-defined variable in Google Analytics, and the embedding site does the same, we overwrite each other's values...

Of course it would be easiest if Google provided a way to change the name of the cookies to a custom one, but I can't find any way to do it. I thought about using cookie domain or path to force a separate cookie, but this doesn't work, because if I set domain or path to something other than the real domain/path, then the cookie is not readable for the page after reload...

Does anyone know a way to have two trackers on one page and make them use separate cookies so that they don't overwrite each other's settings?

Or, if that's completely impossible - is there any other analytics service with similar functionality as GA in which this is possible? (it would have to have advanced features like event and campaign tracking...)

Answer

Paul Thompson picture Paul Thompson · Jan 6, 2010

Now made easy with the new asynchronous tracking code. :)

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/#MultipleCommands

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