Which is the better dimension to use when we're using UTM-tagged web links on social media posts -- landing page, destination page, or destination URL?
We launched and are promoting a new website on social media, using the URLs of the respective pages we're posting about. I want to create a dashboard on GA that captures pageviews and average time spent, but confused whether we should be using the landing page dimension, destination page, or destination URL. Things we've read online are not clearly applicable.
This should be a subset of the overall pageviews/sessions of the new site.
Thx.
You should use the landing page dimension. It is the page the user started the session on.
Related
I use tracking IDs for the links that lead to a landing page on my website. For example:
mywebsite.com/landingpage1?tid=test1
How do I pass on TID=test1 onto the link that will be the call to action to get to another site?
Tracking Ids can vary depending on where the traffic is coming from.
So I would like the TID to be automatically attached to the TID of the outbound link on that page.
I am using WordPress on my website. So I presume that any suitable code could be added either at the header of the page or for the entire website.
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)
Using the German UI of Google Analytics I stumbled upon two dimensions called "Zielseite" and one "Zielseite der Suche"
So switching to English version brought up the following possible dimensions:
Landing Page and Search Destination Page -- no idea what the second "Zielseite" could be.
Using https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/dimsmets I found the following API-names:
ga:landingPagePath
UI Name: Landing Page
The first page in a user's session, or landing page.
ga:searchDestinationPage
UI Name: Destination Page
The page the user immediately visited after performing an internal search on your site. (Usually the search results page).
ga:searchAfterDestinationPage
UI Name: Search Destination Page
A page that the user visited after performing an internal search on your site.
So I started some analysis-queries:
metric: ga:sessions
dimensions: ga:landingPagePath,ga:searchDestinationPage,ga:searchUsed
All results had ga:landingPagePath==ga:seachDestinationPage (no matter if ga:searchUsed==Visits With Site Search or Visits Without Site Search)
That's not what I would expect. (155 with Search and 5237 without Search)
So the question is who this dimensions always have the same value and what which one does have the correct value?
Landing page path is the first page of a session coming from anywhere.
Search destination page is for INTERNAL search results. It is not a landing page -- it is the page you went to after you did a search ON the site itself (assumes that the site has a site search capability and that GA is configured to recognize internal search queries).
Sessions are counted ONLY on landing pages, and including search destination page in your query automatically restricts the query to visits site site search only (there is no (not set) value for that dimension - sessions without a value are excluded from the report). Try the query with Unique Pageviews, with and without the search destination page, and without the landing page, then compare.
Welcome to custom reporting in GA....
I'm collecting data on complexities of several domains- represented by total pages, visited and unvisited.
I was initially finding what I wanted from Google Analytics by drilling down to Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages but wasn't sure if that was returning unvisited sites. Then I tried All Pages per domain, but that returned like 1,800 results for "pages", with params in some cases /Pages/Results.aspx?k=update.
That being said, I don't think I can rely on GA for total pages per site.
Then I thought about using a web scraper, namely web2disk or httrack.com, to scrape for the #pages per domain. Is that a good path to take? Is it necessary to get this information?
Thanks
If you want to know how many pages there are on your site you need to crawl your site to find all the pages. Because of the way it works Google analytics will 100% only show you data on pages which have been loaded (which fires the analytics code) in a browser.
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ is a paid for crawler you can use to find all the pages (£99), or you could potentially try to hack something together using a free crawler like http://import.io (disclaimer: I work at import.io) to get all the URls.
Find all visited pages via GA:
Behaviour -> Site Content -> Landing Pages does not give you any pages which were not 'Landed upon'.
Then I tried All Pages per domain, but that returned like 1,800 results for "pages", with params in some cases /Pages/Results.aspx?k=update.
To remove the params from the page URls you can use a report filter at the top right of the table. Click 'advanced', and use the tools there to exclude params from URls.
Alternatively you can switch your primary dimension to 'Page title' if you have Unique page titles for each page (and identical ones for pages with params).
I have a question regarding Google Analytics and unwanted referral stats generated by a bookmarklet.
I have a web service with GA installed. My users are using a bookmarklet to accomplish a certain task while visiting some other web page. Bookmarklet creates an iframe and opens up a page which is also on my domain and that page contains the same GA code.
For some reason GA sees those web sites (pages that bookmarklet was used on) as referral pages. That creates a problem for me since those pages are not real referrals (no actual links to my site). I have no desire to track pages my users marked with the bookmarklet.
It’s important to mention that bookmarklet page must be a part of the same domain as my main page. I can not move it on other domain or subdomain.
This is what I tried so far:
I’ve created a new GA account (subdomain.mydomain.com) and used it only on my bookmarklet page hoping that all stats related with the bookmarklet will appear on that account. This worked only partially. Stats for the bookmarklet started to appear on the new account but my original GA account continued to track referral pages.
We tried to use a pop up window to load a web page instead of the iframe. No difference.
Any help on how to get rid of unwanted referral sites would be appreciated.
See _setReferrerOveride:
_setReferrerOverride()
_setReferrerOverride(newReferrerUrl)
Sets the referrer URL used to determine campaign tracking values. Use this method to allow gadgets within an iFrame to track referrals correctly. By default, campaign tracking uses the document.referrer property to determine the referrer URL, which is passed in the utmr parameter of the GIF request. However, you can over-ride this parameter with your own value. For example, if you set the new referrer to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hats, the campaign cookie stores a new campaign with source=google, medium=organic, and keyword=hats.
_gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride', 'URL-YOU-WANT-AS-REFERRER']);
Or, you could try
_addIgnoredRef():
_addIgnoredRef()
_addIgnoredRef(newIgnoredReferrer)
Excludes a source as a referring site. Use this option when you want to set certain referring links as direct traffic, rather than as referring sites. For example, your company might own another domain that you want to track as direct traffic so that it does not show up on the "Referring Sites" reports. Requests from excluded referrals are still counted in your overall page view count.
Async Snippet (recommended)
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredRef', 'www.sister-site.com']);
You would have to grab the referrer and populate it dynamically. Probably with parent.document.referrer Of course this might make any referrals (non-bookmarklet) from these sites not record in the future. And, at some point you would need to clear them.
The most simple solution, if you don't need to track the hits from the bookmarklet at all, is to simply not include the GA code in the web page when it is opened by the bookmarklet.
Your bookmarklet can open the page like http://yoursite.com/?mode=bookmarklet
And in your server side code you can use something like
if ( mode != "bookmarklet" ) {
outputGaCode()
}