Cross-domain tracking

Cross-domain tracking is the practice of recognizing one visitor's session as it moves between websites on different domains, so that an action on the second site can be tied to the campaign that brought the person to the first. In an equity crowdfunding raise it is the question of how an ad click on the issuer's site gets connected to an investment that finishes on a funding-portal or broker-dealer site.

Why the record breaks

Browser cookies belong to a domain. The issuer's analytics script cannot read what happens on the intermediary's domain, and the intermediary's systems do not know which ad a visitor clicked unless something is passed across. Without a bridge the issuer sees a click and a departure, the intermediary sees an investment, and neither can say which campaign produced it. Privacy settings, expired sessions, and people who click on a phone and invest later on a laptop create further gaps that no setup fully closes.

Whether there is a handoff at all depends on the page setup. If ads point straight to a portal-hosted reservation page that later becomes the live offering page, there may be no issuer-to-portal page change to track, only a question of what the portal measures and shares.

How the records are joined

• Linker parameters. When both sites run the same analytics property, the tool can append an identifier to links between them. Google Analytics 4, for example, adds a _gl parameter when cross-domain measurement is configured for both domains. This needs the intermediary's agreement to install the tag, which many will not give.
• Campaign fields and an opaque ID. Source, campaign, creative, and an issuer-assigned lead ID are carried in the link to the intermediary, which stores them with the investment record. This works only if the fields survive every redirect, account creation, and email verification. Personal information such as an email address should never go in a URL.
• A return signal. The intermediary reports back through a confirmation-page event, a server-to-server notification (a postback), or a periodic export that can be matched to the issuer's leads. See server-side-tracking.

What counts as the result

A browser event on a thank-you page is not proof of an investment. During a live Reg CF offering a commitment can still be cancelled (see investment-cancellation), so the live event is a provisional active commitment and the intermediary's ledger after close is the financial source of truth. Investments that cannot be matched should be reported as unattributed rather than credited to the last campaign that ran. The joined data feeds cost-per-investor.

Further reading

• Cross-domain tracking for a raise
• Pixels, server events, and consent in a raise
• The measurement dashboard for a raise
• Reservation setups for a raise