domain redirects...

[artinsilk]

I have a domain redirect to my Ecrater store.

Now I am wondering if that is actually slowing down the views to my store.

Also, I am really lost with the Google Analytics. I would like to check the GA for this store here but I do not know what address I should enter in the GA window, taking into account the domain redirect.

Anyone can help me here by any chance?

[tigercreekgifts]

In GA, when I added a domain for tiger creek I created a separate GA profile for tigercreekgifts.com and told GA to pull data from that URL because I wanted to see the difference between buyers that come to my ecrater store using traditional means, and buyers that came directly to tigercreekgifts.com. It never has worked. Got constant error message of unable to locate data for that URL because my ecrater store has a .ecrater.com subdomain, so it wasn't until I added the subdomain that google accepted it and was able pull analytics data which defeated the purpose and I did not need two profiles if both were pulling data only based on my ecrater sub domain.

So enter in your storename.ecrater.com URL for that. Whether you use domain masking or not, google still has to know what the original sub domain is to correctly pull your traffic data from your store. Forwarding without masking should not slow it down but sometimes forwarding with masking will.

If you use forwarding only:

buyer types yourstore.com and is taken to your store but your URL switches back to yourstore.ecrater.com immediately when they arrive.

If you use forwarding with masking:

your URL stays the same and buyers do not see you ecrater subdomain they only see yourstore.com however, it will mask the product IDs too so you know an ecrater URL for an item usually has /products/81587796.php or whatever at the end, that will not show up either on any page so if you share an item or tweet, pin, etc. manually with copy/paste (and not by clicking a button in your store) buyers will be taken back to your homepage only and not the item.

So GA has to know the sub domain anyway or else yourstore.com will be masked from GA too and they won't be able to generate traffic data for you. So use your ecrater subdomain. It didn't used to behave this way but ecrater placed a block on domain forwarding and now if you want yourstore.com to show instead of yourstore.ecrater.com but still have the product ID info at the end of the URLs you have to pay ecrater a yearly premium for this. Now if you pay the yearly fee, GA would probably accept yourstore.com and not still require the sub domain to work.

[artinsilk]

I will try what you are suggesting, I hope I can figure it out...

[tigercreekgifts]

Just to clarify in case I was confusing. I have a tigercreekgifts.com URL that I lead people to but don't have a private website yet because I'm picky and can't find a website designer I like best so in the meantime I have tigercreekgifts.com set up to redirect people to my ecrater store when they type it in. I have it forwarded to ecrater thru Godaddy.

I already have a GA profile set up for my ecrater store sub domain to see the traffic trends but wanted to created a new GA profile for tigercreekgifts.com to see if it would work, and see how many people are using my direct URL and how many people are coming to tigercreekgifts.ecrater.com. But since my direct URL leads buyers to my store which still has a subdomain that is masked (hidden from their view) google is unable to pull data from my direct URL, they still needed the ecrater sub domain to make it work.

So with an ecrater store, there is no way that I am aware of to see how many people are using your direct URL because GA won't accept it. So I ended up removing my direct URL and replacing it with my ecrater sub domain again, and after I did that I stopped getting errors and the stats for my store were available again. Now if your direct URL eventually leads elsewhere (weebly store, yahoo store, yola website) you can create another GA profile for that and it will work. But all ecrater stores will only show data on GA if you type in your original ecrater sub domain. The only way to know if buyers are using your new URL is to survey them when they order, and ask them.

Since I am using domain forwarding, also if I check one of those websites like rate my site .com that gives you public stats on a website like daily views, click thru rates, how long the website has been open, etc. if you enter in your direct URL, when your ecrater store info pops up it will show the sub domain as well and specify that you are using domain forwarding for a marketplace store. I hate that but, like I said ecrater is set up so if you want your sub domain URL to vanish so people never see that one you have to pay a premium fee for this.

You can still set your URL to hide the ecrater sub domain, but if you don't purchase the premium service your URLs will be missing the product numbers and names and buyers will only see yourstore.com on every page they visit which makes sharing your items more difficult for buyers that don't use the social buttons in our listings. Some older buyers are old fashioned and are used to using copy/paste for sharing and that function will not work right if your direct URL has no product numbers behind it.