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....
Related
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.
I am a beginner Wordpress developer and am developing a WordPress search plugin with some AI based API involved.
How does plugin work?
User fire some search in search widget
If the query text is identical to AI based API we get some textual result and relevant URL (within site) to redirect the page.
If query text is strange or beyond AI's scope of identification then we invoke search widget submit. By calling 'el.submit()' JS method.
What is the problem?
My plugin is working as expected on the home page. Ex www.example.com
If I search 'Google search console' (Which is an internal article) then search widget invoking the native search and search widget submits the form. URL becomes www.example.com/?s=Google+search+console.
Problem: When I go to www.example.com/blog and fire the same search query then URL becoming www.example.com/blog/?s=Google%20search%20console
Resulting in 'Page not found'.
It is weird. Do somebody had any idea what is happening here or why two different constructs of a search query on relative pages within the site.
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)
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 my application configured with google analystics. Its a e-learning application in which i have students and instructors.
I want to analysze the home page clicks for both student and instructor. The problem is the home page for student is also available in instructor but as some other page means same URL but different locations.
Now, i have added the script in ONLY student's page. By doing this though i have mapped the URL for an instructor page as well, will that effect the analysis? Will the data collected for students home page be affected by click on same link for instructor ?
If you have a single page that both students and instructors go to, then yes, your data will all show up under the same URL, and you will not be able to tell which views are from students and which are from instructors.
If you have the code ONLY populating when a student is on the page, then yes, this will affect your reports. You will be able to see how many students are viewing the page, but you will not know anything about the instructors viewing the page.
There are 2 things you can do with the GA code to get your numbers:
1) Report a different URL or page name depending on who is viewing. By default, GA reports the URL as the page name, but there is an optional 2nd argument to the _trackPageview call on your page that lets you specify what you want the page name to be. This will make your pages reports show two different entries.
2) Populate a custom variable on the page. This will show all traffic to the same page, but you will be able to use the custom variable to see how much of the traffic is from who.
The accepted answer was for the Classic GA snippet. For the latest GA snippet (Universal), you'd want to go with this.
ga('send', 'pageview', {
'page': '/my-overridden-page?id=1',
'title': 'my overridden page'
});
See Overriding Default Values in the GA Docs.