Why Marketers Need Unified Subdomain Tracking

To follow up well, your sales team needs the complete picture of what a prospect did. But a prospect's journey rarely happens on one website. They might read a blog post on your main site, check the documentation on your support portal, and look at pricing on a dedicated landing page.

If you aren't tying these subdomains together, you're losing the evidence of what each prospect wants. Here is why tracking every subdomain in one account matters for your marketing, and how Bread & Butter makes setting it up simple.

In short: Put every subdomain of your website in the same Bread & Butter account, with the same tracking code. A visitor who reads your blog, opens your help centre and then raises a hand on a landing page is one profile with one journey, their Focused Score reflects everything they read, and the Intelligence Brief your team gets tells the whole story. Bread & Butter finds your subdomains for you: approve them under Settings, then App & Domains, and install the same code on each one. On WordPress, the plugin also keeps the whole path first-party, so content blockers have nothing to stop. Free tracks your main domain only; Pro adds 3 subdomains and Pro Plus 9. A completely different domain is a different account.

The benefits of tracking every subdomain together

No more split-up analytics. Without it, an engaged prospect moving from your main site (yourdomain.com) to your web app (app.yourdomain.com) looks like two different people. Tracking both in one account joins them up, so the same person doesn't show up as a "bounced" visit on one site and a stranger on the other.
The complete buyer journey. See exactly which content leads to conversions. With your sites linked, you can see how an educational article on your blog led to a demo request on your landing page subdomain.
A Focused Score built on everything they did. Focused Score rates each visitor on how closely they read across all your pages. Joining your subdomains gives it the full picture, so your sales team knows how engaged a lead really is, and the Intelligence Brief tells them what that person read, so the follow-up is about what they care about.
Attribution that goes all the way back: which post, campaign or page started the journey, not just which one ended it.
Lead Gen Autopilot across all of it. Its Auto-Gate reads every domain set up in the account, so a guide on your blog subdomain can be gated too.

The first-party advantage on WordPress

If your subdomains run on WordPress, putting them in your account with the Bread & Butter plugin brings one more advantage: a first-party path for your data, end to end.

Why it matters for marketers. Most tracking tools load a script from their own domain and send the data back to it from the visitor's browser. Ad blockers, privacy browsers and content blocker extensions work from lists of known third-party tracker domains and refuse those requests, so sessions go missing without any warning, and your dashboard still looks healthy.

What the plugin does differently. The plugin serves the Bread & Butter script from your own domain. The JavaScript still captures behaviour in the browser, because that's the only place it exists, but instead of calling us from the visitor's browser, the plugin stores the data on your own WordPress site and your server delivers it to us, server to server. The visitor's browser only ever talks to your website, so a content blocker has nothing to stop, and fewer sessions fall through the gaps.

On Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace and the other platforms, the tracking code gives you everything else the same way: the same scoring, research and joined-up journeys. What it can't give you is the first-party path, because no server of yours is involved. Whichever way you install it, Bread & Butter uses no third-party cookies. See Server-Side vs. Browser-Side Tracking: The Reliability and Ethics of Bread & Butter.

What breaks when subdomains are tracked apart

One person becomes several. Someone who arrives on blog.yourcompany.com, comes back to yourcompany.com a week later, then books a demo on info.yourcompany.com shows up as three visitors, two of whom left after one page.
The journey loses its beginning. The lead reaches your CRM with the demo request and nothing before it. The three articles they read first, the pricing page they opened twice, the help centre search that shows what they're trying to do: all of it is sitting somewhere else.
Focused Score works from part of the evidence. Split the pages apart and every visitor looks less interested than they are.
Attribution credits the wrong page. The blog post that started the journey gets nothing; the landing page that finished it gets everything.

What is a peripheral subdomain?

Peripheral subdomains are secondary websites under your main root domain that serve a specific marketing, sales or support purpose. Common examples:

Dedicated landing pages: info.yourwebsite.com or promo.yourwebsite.com
Support and help centres: support.yourwebsite.com or help.yourwebsite.com
Ecommerce stores: shop.yourwebsite.com
Web apps and portals: app.yourwebsite.com
Blogs, documentation and careers: blog., docs. and careers.yourwebsite.com

Add them to the account you already have.

A completely different domain is a different account: a second brand, a client's website, a site you've taken on. Each account has its own tracking code, data, plan and team. See How do I manage multiple clients using the Accounts section?

How many subdomains your plan includes

How many subdomains you can track depends on your Bread & Butter plan:

Plan	What you can track
Free	Your main root domain only
Pro	Your main domain and 3 subdomains
Pro Plus	Your main domain and 9 subdomains

Need more subdomains? Contact us through the chat.

Simple setup: Bread & Butter finds your subdomains

Tracking several subdomains used to mean registering each URL by hand, managing keys and sending tickets to your web developers.

Bread & Butter does the finding for you: it looks up your company's subdomains and lists them, ready to approve. Approving them takes no code. The tracking code still has to be on each subdomain, which your web team, or the WordPress plugin, takes care of.

Approve the subdomains. Sign in to Bread & Butter and open Settings, then App & Domains. Review the subdomains Bread & Butter found and click Approve next to each one you want tracked in this account. If one is missing, add it with Create new.
Install the tracking code on each subdomain.
- WordPress: install the Bread & Butter plugin on the subdomain and run the setup. It sees that it's on a subdomain and asks Merge Subdomain?, showing your main domain. Click Merge Accounts, and the subdomain joins your main account with nothing else to set up. Don't choose to continue with a separate account, or the subdomain is tracked on its own. If that's already happened, contact us through the chat and we'll merge it.
- Any other platform: paste the same tracking code into the head of every page on the subdomain, directly or through Google Tag Manager.
Check it's working. Open the subdomain in a private window, click through a few pages, then look for the visit under Opportunities, then All Traffic.

From then on, each prospect's journey joins up across your domains.

The step-by-step version, platform by platform, is in How to Add Tracking Code to Peripheral Subdomains and How to Install Bread & Butter on Your Website.

If one subdomain tracks and another doesn't, it's nearly always the code missing from the second one. See Troubleshooting Installation.