: How to get statistics and reporting on alternate domain names that you own? I own several variations on my domain name that all 301 redirect to the main site. The problem is that I have

@Eichhorn148

One way of getting Google Analytics to show alternate domain name usage: treat the alternate domain names as marketing campaigns and append Google Analytics campaign tracking parameters to the URLs.

For example, if my domain name is example.com and my alternate domain name is example.net, I can configure the redirect like this:

example.net/ → example.com/?utm_campaign=domainnames&utm_medium=domain&utm_source=example.net

Then I get the reporting that I want in Google Analytics under "Acquisition" → "Campaigns".

There are some downsides to this:


Redirects like this are difficult to implement correctly. You want the following cases to work and they may not all do so using many redirect mechanisms:
example.net/path/doc.html → example.com/path/doc.html?utm_campaign=domainnames&utm_medium=domain&utm_source=example.net http://example.net/?a=b → example.com/?a=b&utm_campaign=domainnames&utm_medium=domain&utm_source=example.net
Search engine bots may also see these parameters and not be able to assign link juice properly because of them. The meta rel canonical tag on all landing pages would help with this.

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@Cugini213

If the different domain names are essentially covering common misspellings or longer and shorter versions of your main domain name then, @adam -asdf's approach above is probably your best option though I've always found Piwik Analytics far better than AWStats in case you wanted to take a look at that, the user interface is more user-friendly and a little more similar to Google Analytics which you're already using.

If the different domain names are really keyword domains that you registered primarily to help with SEO, then setting them up as microsites can sometimes be quite effective. If this is what you had in mind then please add a comment to that effect and I'll go into more detail for you.

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@Caterina187

I'm not sure about this but I'll hazard a guess.

Verify all the domains in Webmaster Tools (Google, Bing) this will help you to see 'who links to you.' As far as links, also try Majestic SEO.

The other thing I would try is implementing some server statistics software like AWStats (not sure if Go Daddy provides it but it is usually available in cPanel). I'd think this would allow you to get an idea of how many times the 'page' is loaded, even if it is a 301 redirect.

If the other domains are to protect your name and don't have much SEO value (don't have links built) you can use a <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://example.com/"> tag to redirect and visitors will then show up in your analytics as referral traffic (although setting the content=" to less than 3 can result in problematic redirects if users hit the 'back' button on their browser).

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