In the past, with older Google Analytics accounts and properties I was able to use a Custom Report on a View to show a table of Full Referral URLs.
But with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) I can no longer have Views, so I'm at a loss how I can show Full Referral URLs? I can show the Referral Source (domain name only) but I'd prefer to see the full Referral Path.
Any ideas how I can go about this?
Thank you.
Closest I can find is to use the Explore tab to create a new Exploration with the following settings:
Variables
Dimensions: Page referrer
Metrics: Active users
Tab Settings
rows: Page referrer
show rows: 500 (optional)
values: Active users
cell type: Heat map (optional)
filters: (exclude any URL patterns here)
Then minimize the Variables and Settings panels.
This will give you a long table of full referrer URLs along with the number of users that came from there. In my case most are domain names, but a handful are full URLs pointing to a page.
It remains to be seen if this can be done more easily or more comprehensively.
Related
I'm looking for some help creating a Google Analytics report that shows, in a timeline, the number of Users who visited one page (e.g. Checkout page) but NOT another page (e.g. Thank You page), and in that order. This seems like such a simply report to run, but I cannot seem to find the right settings in Google Analytics to pull this together.
What you need is a segment with the following settings:
Include sessions
Page includes /checkout (replace with your checkout URL) AND
Page excludes /thankyou (replace with whatever your thank you page URL is)
We have two platforms, a marketing site and a SaaS solution.
The marketingsite is on the main domain like www.domain.com and the SaaS solutions is on our subdomain sub.domain.com.
I would like to track the conversion rate of the customers signing up on our SaaS solution through our marketingsite.
If I go into goals for the marketingsite I can choose a relative path to the goal like www.domain.com/signup-completed, but the actual signup is on sub.domain.com/signup-completed. How can I track this on the marketing site?
The two sites are setup as different properties under the same account.
First of all, the property must be same for both subdomain and domain, i.e. same UA id.
Secondly, to track goals from sub domain, you need to include every part of the URL in the Page dimension. Normally you will not be able to distinguish which page is on which domain
For the above you need to create a filter that would modify the URL to include domain:
Steps:
In the View (Profile) Settings page, click the Add Filter link.
Choose Add New Filter and provide the filter a name.
Choose Custom Filter and select Advanced on the Filter type settings.
Under Advanced settings:
FieldA should be set to Hostname
FieldB should be set to Request URI
Set the values for both Field A and Field B to (.*), which is an
expression that captures all characters.
Set the Output To --> Constructor option to Request URI and provide
$A1$B1 as the value for that choice.
Your reports will now show:
www.domain.com/example.html
sub.domain.com/moreexample.html
This will capture the www.domain.com portion of your URL and include that at the beginning of your page URL in the content reports section.
You can then easily set the goals :)
PS: I would recommend to create new view, place this filter and then create goals, so that the data in other views wont be affected
So I 've discovered that all visits to my website by users who are using the Chinese social network, WeChat, have extra parameters after the landing page URL.
For example, most people who visit the page have this listed as the landing page URL:
/blog/zhou-youguang-the-father-of-pinyin/
However, anyone who visited from the WeChat Moments feature, has this listed as the landing page URL: /blog/zhou-youguang-the-father-of-pinyin/?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0
So it adds ?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0 to the end of the URL.
There are other extensions that WeChat may add to the end of the URL including:
/?from=timeline
/?from=groupmessage&isappinstalled=0
/?from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=0
Further in the "Acquisition Overview" section, it lists these visits, not under "Social", but instead under "Direct".
I want to use the filters feature in Google Analytics to put all of these visitors in the Social section and categorized with the social network WeChat.
Is this possible? How do I do this.
Thanks!
Update: I've written an article about “?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0” on Google Analytics. I've just explained what caused it, but I haven't been able to figure out how to organize these visitors with Google Analytics effectively. I'm still researching this. If you have any ideas for me to try, please let me know. Thanks!
It's easy, just add two advanced filters in GA:
1) WeChat Campaign Source fliter:
Request URI = "from=([^&]*)&isappinstalled=(0|1)"
Selete Campaign Source as Output, and set value to "WeChat"
2) WeChat Campaign Medium filter:
Request URI = "from=([^&]*)"
Select Campaign Medium as Output, and set value to "$A1"
Done, You can see it in action
You have to use the Channel Settings.
Go to Admin > View (the right column) > Channel Setting > Channel Grouping.
Take the "Default Channel Grouping" and take "Social". Here you can add the destination URLs from WeChat to the social channel grouping - like this:
I don't understand this. How can this happen?
I have an educational site and when I looked at Google Analytics I saw a porn page in active page which doesn't exist on my site.
What is this and how can I stop this from happening?
I checked for that page on my website and there is no such page.
This is not actually a hit for a Page on your website, it is rather a Referral (i.e. the source from which a user was supposedly coming from before landing on your site): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en
It is actually spam generated by bots and crawlers, and you can follow the steps listed in this article to mitigate this issue: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
For the most common sources of Referral Spam, you might want to add an Exclude Filter to simply ignore those hits:
To filter out a referring source from your reports, create the following filter:
Filter Type: Custom Filter > Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: Enter the domain of the referring source that you would like to exclude, for example, google.com. You can use regular expressions if you would like to exclude several referring sources.
If you are wondering about the "Active Page" view listing a spammy-looking URL, it is because that page most likely is a 404 page your website serves in response to the request.
Note that the URL also begins with a slash delimiter ("/"), as in yourwebsite.com/www.spammy-site.com -- this will show up in Analytics as /www.spammy-site.com, as in the examples above.
This is Ghost Referrer Spam, and it shows as both pages and/or referrals(you can see it in the screenshot bellow). This "visits" never reach your website actually. The only thing you should worry about is your data since it affects your statistics by adding useless data to your Google Analytics.
The only way to stop them for now is by filtering them in Google Analytics as #Philippe mention you can add a single filter or you can use a more general approach with a filter based on Valid Hostnames that will stop this and most of the Referrer Spam.
Basically, this works by excluding all hits that don't have any of your valid hostnames since the spammers don't know who are they targeting they use a fake or empty hostname as you can see in the screenshots
Here is more information about this solution and others https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
1 In Google Analytics, go to the Admin tab.
2 Go to View Column and select Filters.
3 Click on New Filter.
4 Put Spam Porn Referrals as a name for the Filter.
5 Filter Type select Custom. Filter Field, find and select Campaign
Source. In the Filter Pattern text box, copy and paste this Regular
Expression.
depositfiles-porn.ga|youporn-forum.ga|pornhub-forum.ga|generalporn.org|rapidgator-porn.ga|meendo-free-traffic.ga|amanda-porn.ga|torture.ml|pornhub-forum.uni.me
6 Click Save.
You can check this link also. I have seen the same problem and now i am done with this.
Stop Spam or adult site referrals in google analytics
We've accidentally placed the same Google Analytics tracking code on two different domains.
www.y.com
www.x.com
We've rectified the issue now but retrospectively, is there any way to filter that data going to the specific domain name www.x.com for example?
Note: this is not a duplicate of Google Analytics: Track two domains as one
You could add a filter to the view (profile) in question. That will remove the data that you don't want. Another option if you don't want to loose the data in the view would be to create a custom segment that you could use when ever you want to split the data out.
Update from Google+
You can search with regex
^/app/
in the small search bar (custom segment) in your page reports (e.g. Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages), after which you can look at the aggregate metrics for all pages which start with /app/ (i.e. all the pages with different parameters).
If all the /app/.* have the same page title, you can look at the Behavior > Overview report, but choose Page Title as the dimension.