Cross-navigation tracking

When users navigate between different domains in your ecosystem, their user identity may get fragmented. Examples include navigation from your main website to a partner site, or to a mobile app. This creates gaps in your user journey data and makes it difficult to understand the complete customer experience across your digital properties.

Web subdomains

This problem doesn't usually apply for navigation between web subdomains, for example between www.example.com and blog.example.com. This is because the web trackers have discoverRootDomain enabled by default.

Cross-navigation (also called cross-domain) tracking solves this problem by passing user identification data in URL parameters when users click links to other domains. This enables you to maintain user continuity across your applications.

To use cross-navigation tracking, configure the web or native mobile trackers to add an additional parameter, named _sp, to the querystring of outbound links. This process is called "link decoration".

Link decoration makes the added values visible in the url field of events on the destination page or URI. The querystring is added only to the events at the destination page: it doesn't persist throughout the user's session.

Querystring properties#

The _sp querystring parameter has two different formats: extended or short. You can also configure exactly which properties you want to include.

Available properties:

Property	Description	Extended	Short
domainUserId	Current tracker-generated UUID user identifier	✅	✅
timestamp	Current epoch timestamp, millisecond precision	✅	✅
sessionId	Current session UUID identifier	✅
subjectUserId	Custom business user identifier	✅
sourceId	Application identifier	✅
sourcePlatform	Platform of the current device	✅
reason	Custom information or identifier	✅

For example, the link appSchema://path/to/page would look like this after decoration with the full extended format:

appSchema://path/to/page?_sp=domainUserId.timestamp.sessionId.subjectUserId.sourceId.sourcePlatform.reason

How are the querystring parameters processed?#

By default, your pipeline will process only the short format querystring _sp={domainUserId}.{timestamp}, even if you've decorated the links with the extended format. To process the extra properties, you'll need to configure the cross-navigation enrichment.

Both default and extended formats will populate the atomic refr_domain_userid and refr_dvce_tstamp fields. The enrichment also adds a cross_navigation entity to the event.

Feature	Default behavior	With cross-navigation enrichment
Processes short format _sp={domainUserId}.{timestamp}	✅	✅
Processes extended format properties	❌	✅
Populates refr_domain_userid field	✅	✅
Populates refr_dvce_tstamp field	✅	✅
Adds cross_navigation entity	❌	✅