Generate report from Google Analytics with specific URLs and monthly pageviews? - google-analytics

I have been asked to track several existing pages (about 50 in total) and track monthly page views.
So far in GA I have not been able to find an automated and quick way to do this. What GA does quite easily is let you filter based on URL but if I have to do this manually each time I am going to get old, fast.
Ideally want I want to be able to do is create a custom report that spits out monthly page views for select URLs.
Is this possible at all?

Related

Tracking a Search that leads to a sale in GA

This seems really basic but i am struggling with it
We have a client who runs a travel website.
They have a few different search bars eg Flights, Hotels, Carhire.
I am trying to track the performance of each... "What % of people completed a sale that ran a Flight search." Same for Hotel, and for Car hire
Any ideas for the best way to get this info in GA?
Many thanks
There are a few ways to get this information, each with their pros and cons. The options that I see immediately available are segments and goals.
Segments are great because they are retrospective and generally more flexible, with the ability to be changed if you find your criteria isn't quite right. You create here, and specify sessions that go through search results pages etc:
Then you can create another segment for booking confirmation page, and any other intermediary steps that you'd like to report on. The main con of segments is that you can only pull in 4 at a time, but if you have more you can pull them 4 at a time and copy+paste the data into an excel sheet or google sheet. Segments can also be pulled via the Core Reporting Api and DataStudio which makes them great for automating into dashboards.
Goals are cool because they pull into the default reports, and basically track sessions through a particular page, event or sequence. The main con I see and the reason is that I don't use them is that they only start tracking fro mthe time you create them , and if you change the configuration it does not impact historical data, so your data can get messed up quickly if you don't have sandbox GA views or sandbox goals for your testing before putting it into a dedicated goal slot. You can also only have 10 or 20 goals depending on your plan, so once data is tracked against that goal you can't remove or clear it.

merging profile views in google analytics

I have a website where users commonly go to x/y/z/userprofile=123456 and so my analytics data is being polluted with a lot of different profile views. I want to merge them all into one 'viewed profile' bit of data.
Does anyone have any idea exactly what I should be putting into filters to get the information I want?
I am completely new to GA so I am really unsure where to start

Doing cohort analytics on Google Analytics

Suppose I have 65 people that register on January 1, 2012.
I want to find out how many of those 65 people returned to the site that same week. (More generally, if n people signup on date A, I want to be able to find out how many of those n people return in a given date range.)
Is there a way to do this using Google Analytics? If so, how? I am currently getting the user's username for each page hit.
If you only need to track people who sign in then you don't need to get very fancy. You can copy the relevant user attributes, such as sign up date, from your DB to GA using events or session level custom variables.
But if you want to track everyone, including those who don't sign up, then you'll need to use visitor level custom variables (GA cookies).
I explain how to set this up in detail in this post so I'll just highlight the key points here:
First, decide how to layout the data in Google Analytic's custom variables based on your requirements. For example, are you storing retention dates for daily, weekly or monthly tracking? Do you also want to track cohort goals? Partition this data into the available custom variable slots.
Write the cohort data to these custom variables when visitors arrive or achieve goals using Google Analytic's _setCustomVar function. Setting the fourth parameter of that function to 1 indicates you want to do visitor-level (cookie) tracking.
For each cohort you wish to analyze, create an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Using a regex expression in the condition will give you the flexibility to segment for interesting cohorts. ex: "All users whose first visit was the week before Christmas".
Analyze the results with reports by specifying a date range and the corresponding cohort-sliced advanced segments. Another option is to extract the data using the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer or their API.
Once you've put in the work your new visitors will be stamped by their first visit date and nicely fall into each daily or weekly retention bucket. This is what it might look like if you were tracking weekly retention, for example:
This is not a full solution, but here are some points on how I would approach this problem with the help of Google Analytics:
You have to make sure that you somehow store the registration date of each user, either in your database or in a cookie. Then have a look at Google Analytics Event Tracking. You could for example set up a new category based on the registration date. On every page load in your page, you then have to set up this event tracking call, for example like:
_trackEvent("returns", "2012-01-01", "UserId:123123123")
This way you will receive all page views for users that registered on that particular date. To add a date range in this, you have to make sure that these events only get fired for the number of dates after the signup (e.g. 7 days).
After your date range, you will be able to see how many page views and how many users returned - you even know which users came back.

google analytics double counting conversions

I sell a PDF that is delivered on the same page that is being used to count conversions in Google Analytics. Will GA count multiple visits to this page over a couple of days? For example, person downloads PDF, a few days later they revisit the page and download the pdf again. Their has only been one conversion but multiple visits.
Thank you
It's better if you post your code here. Without that I cannot tell for sure.
Probably yes, GA will count a conversion each time your customer visit the download page, because you probably define it as your goal for conversions, correct? I think the easiest way to avoid this is to define another page as your goal or provide the subsequent downloads in other place.
Anyway, is possible to configure GA or your page to prevent this behavior, but is necessary to know more about your page...

Best way to generate an automated report in Google Analytics for a specific collection of URLs

Currently using Google Analytics as a supplement to our paid tracking software, but neither of them are giving us exactly what we need.
I have a list of about 60 or so urls (out of about 1500) on the site that I wish to setup a monthly report for that can be emailed to multiple recipients. I can't seem to figure out how to create a report showing just the hits on these 60 urls, I can apply advanced filters on the content page but those disappear after a while and sometimes error out when adding too many URL's.
Is there a method I'm missing in Google Analytics to achieve this goal or am I better running an SSIS package to pull the URL's from the API and formatting a document that way?
Yeah, advanced filters are not really designed for this kind of thing.
Here are some things which may work for you:
Try setting up a new GA Profile with an Include filter to filter only the URLs that you want to report on. You can use a regular expression to identify the 60 URLs. Then these will be the only URLs tracked in that particular profile.
Try setting up an Advanced Segment to select the Pages using a very long "OR" filter.
You could set up a new GA account and log the URLs into that account with additional tracking code. This is not really recommended as the 2 accounts will share tracking cookies.
Use Excellent Analytics to pull down data into Excel for the URLs in question using the GA Export API.

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