One Hardcoded Analytics Parameter, Every Spanish-Site Visitor Miscounted

July 2, 2026 · 4 min read · Sample audit: SAC Attorneys LLP

SAC Attorneys LLP serves Silicon Valley business and immigration clients, and runs dedicated Spanish- and Chinese-language versions of its site alongside the main English one — a real investment in reaching a broader client base. That effort is quietly undercut by one line in the homepage's own navigation.

What's actually on the page

The Español link in the main nav doesn't just point to abogado.sacattorneys.com. It points here:

https://abogado.sacattorneys.com/?_gl=1*nhwzhf*_gcl_au*MTA4MjgyNzk4OS4xNzE1MDA4ODQ1

That _gl string is a Google Analytics cross-domain linker parameter. It exists to let Analytics recognize that a visitor who started on sacattorneys.com and clicked through to abogado.sacattorneys.com is the same person, so the two halves of their visit get stitched into one session instead of counted as two unrelated ones.

Why a static value breaks the whole point

The linker parameter is supposed to be generated fresh, per visitor, at the moment they click the link — that's the entire mechanism. Written directly into the page's HTML as a fixed string, it does the opposite of its job: every single visitor who clicks "Español," regardless of who they are, gets tagged with the exact same session identifier. Analytics has no way to tell them apart. Depending on how the account is configured, that can mean cross-domain sessions merging into one inflated "user," bounce and duration metrics for the Spanish site becoming meaningless, or traffic simply failing to link at all.

For a firm actively trying to understand and grow its Spanish-speaking client base, that's the exact audience whose behavior the analytics setup can no longer see clearly.

The fix

This isn't a rebuild — it's a one-line change. The linker parameter needs to be generated dynamically by the Analytics linker plugin at click time, not hardcoded into the anchor's href. Most site builders that support GA4 cross-domain tracking handle this automatically once it's configured correctly; the current link suggests it was set up once, copied as a static URL, and never revisited.