Google analytics session linking between mobile app and webview

Question

We have a hybrid mobile app (implemented using ReactNative) that incorporates a webview of our website for its ecommerce cart. We have Google Analytics tracking (using the same GA property) in both the app and the website, and ecommerce tracking is enabled on the cart website.

The aim is to have ecommerce tracking (from activity in the webview) work for GA sessions that start on the native app.

Is it possible to enable something like Cross Domain tracking between between the app and the website so that a GA session started by the app will be used by the site within the webview?

Answer 1

This scenario isn't supported by the normal GA auto-linker plugin, but it's should be possible to do this manually by extracting the GA session id (clientId) from the session started on the app and passing it to the webview (eg via URL parameters), to set it explicitly as described here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cross-domain

Google Tag Manager

Note that if you're using Google Tag Manager in the webview, you can set clientId as one of the "Fields to Set" in the UA tag configuration.

You'll also need to define a custom Javascript variable to extract clientId from the URL (or undefined if it's not present or invalid, which means GA will fall back to it's normal behavior).