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How to Monitor Multiple Language Websites with GA4 in Google Analytics
So here’s the deal. I have this website with individual domains for each language.
Like, for instance, I’ve got this: https://www.example.com
And then there’s this: https://in.example.com along with this: https://br.example.com
Now, the hitch is that my GA4 property, which was set up by another team member, looks like it’s collecting data from all these sites combined.
When I hop into Google Data Studio and dabble with the “Full page URL” column, I see views popping up for in, uk and others.
The thing is, I’m not completely sure how this is supposed to work, and I’m scratching my head over the best way to track the different domains.
I should make things clearer. You see, my main issue was that I was working with the ready-made dashboards in Google Analytics. But, thankfully, I found my answer here, which essentially involves using the hostname and page path dimensions to separately fetch data for different hostnames.
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2 Replies
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Alright, so from your description, it sounds like you are already halfway there. You’re using the
hostnamedimension, right? That’s going to allow you to tell apart hits coming from different subdomains, so that’s all fine and dandy. Don’t worry, theFull URLdimension should cover your needs as well.Now, you might be thinking of using a custom dimension to sort this out. But remember, the number of these are limited, so you need to use them sparingly. Let’s not jump at that solution just yet.
It seems like you’re expecting there’s an issue, but you haven’t exactly told me what it is. Now if you really want to make sure everything’s being captured the right way, what you can do is check out the network requests your site is sending to Google’s
collectendpoint. Pay close attention to thedlfield – you want to see that it’s reflecting the full URL appropriately. However, don’t stress about it unless you’re noticing something odd in your data. After all, thedlfield is generally the same aswindow.location.hrefand isn’t often changed. -
In simple terms, your website is set-up in a way where different sections are essentially considered as separate sites, each for a different language. These are seen as different sites by Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the tool you are using to collect data about who’s visiting your pages. Because of this, GA4 is gathering data for all these different ‘sites’ and compiling it together, which is why you are seeing data from all the different language versions in one place.
When you go into Google Data Studio, you’re seeing a representation of this combined data. The strings ‘in’, ‘uk’, and so on represent the different languages. So, ‘in’ likely represents the Indian version of the site, ‘uk’ the British version, and so on.
The confusion, it seems, comes from accessing the data through the ready-made dashboards in Google Analytics. They pull in all the data together, making it hard to differentiate. But good news: you’ve discovered a solution. By looking at the ‘hostname’ and ‘page path’ metrics, you can get specific data for each language version of the site. These two metrics together effectively tell you which specific site (or language version) a page view happened on. So, you can use them to separate out the data for different languages.
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