We have x websites and already have a Piwik “Site” for each of them.
But we also want a separate Piwik “Site” that encompasses ALL of them, but not a “Meta Site”, because of the downsides that Meta Sites bring (most importantly, roll-up properties with separate visitor namespaces, see Use meta sites & apps to merge data and create a meta setup in Tag Manager | Piwik PRO help center : “A meta site/app combines data from connected entities but doesn’t track visitors across domains or subdomains. A visitor who moves from one site to another is counted separately for each site.”).
The client only uses Piwik Tag Manager. As I have learned now, Piwik does not handle Tag Management “Sites” separately from Analytics “Sites”, they are glued together, as if Tag Management and Analytics had some innate connection. So there seems to be no way to track requests to another Piwik Analytics “Site” than the “Site” of the particular Tag Manager I am in. (unless I use a lot of custom code, and here I am not sure how well Piwik behaves when multiple sites are tracked from the same TM account).
As mentioned, there are “Meta Sites” to alleviate this a bit, but here I need to live with separate visitor namespaces, so a user going from one “Site” to another one - even if that other side is on the same main domain - will be counted twice.
Note: both the guide and linked post mention Matomo, but in the end, it’s a really similar situation when you want to track additional property using the same TM container.
Thanks, and please correct me, but that’s essentially what I wrote: You need to add lots of custom code and cannot leverage the built-in tags.
Can you at least reuse the existing tags (eg an existing tag to track a virtual pageview or some button click) and the Custom Dimension setup and just add an additional “destination” (the additional PP tracker) to them? I don’t see that option. I would have to duplicate everything… That gets very redundant with 50 click tracking tags etc.
I guess it’s better when you’re completely sure that the overarching site would need exactly the same setup of additional custom events. In this case, it simply sends all the data to the additional destination. What’s not so cool about it is that you have to disable the default Piwik PRO tag and replace it with custom code tag.
Yes, even though it is custom code, that option looks more scalable and it does not require this weird dualism of having a “normal” tag for Piwik Site 1 alongside a custom code tag for Piwik Site 2.