I've implemented GA on our b2b site. It's strictly internal but we'd like to track behaviors of users to see if some of the sections on the site are relevant. So, it's working, but say you have
www.blahblah.com and you want to also track
www.blahblah.com/edit
www.blahblah.com/askquestion
Do you set up a filter for this? I did try it and not sure if it's working quite yet. Any info/advice would be greatly appreciated. I am brand new to GA.
Thanks
Not quite sure what you are asking.
If you want to know about metrics for the individual pages you'd go to to the Aquisition->Page Content reports. Overview will give you, well, an overview (you can use the filter box to look at the metrics for any specific Url), Content Drilldown will display a view structured by url hierarchy.
If you're after user behaviour you can create segments. If you want to know if somebody vistited the homepage and, after that, the /edit page you'd got to advanced segments (the arrow above the "Explorer" Tab in most views, click "create new segment", choose "sequence" from the advanced tab, choose page as dimension and "/" to filter for as step one, "/edit" as filter value for page two, enter a name for the segment and click save. Now you'll get all reports only for visitors who have visited those two pages, starting with the homepage.
There are a number of predefined segments, you should try them to see what they can do. You need a pretty good understanding of metrics and dimensions in GA to get the full value from segments, but the simple stuff (e.g. analyze differences between marketing channels) is already pretty useful.
So, for page performance seek out reports with page metrics and use filters. To analyze user behavior use segments which apply to most of the GA reports.
Hope that helps, if not you might to explain more specifically what you want to see in your reports.
You can create separate custom report for individual sections and drilldown by almost all the GA provided dimensions. please reffer the sampel provided.
Please access this URL in your browser as this is a predefined custom report which does the same thing you want. This will get saved under custom reports. You need to edit the custom report and give your own path/section insted of "/services/" under filters section
Related
I have a custom build page where users can filter products based on price, category, brand, ...
These are made out of checkboxes and a range input for the price.
I'm trying to figure out what the best way would be to track every action/filter in order to find out which brand / categories are the most popular.
Important to know
The menu contains a submenu for the categories. When the user clicks one of these links the filterpage will have this category checked in the filters.
The page does not reload when applying a filter. I'm using JS to perform a search and show new results. The page url gets updated with the correct search query parameters.
I think I have 2 options:
Track click events on the checkboxes and send every change with datalayer.push.
Track the page URL after each filter.
Option 1 is an issue because people might go to the page with some parameters in the URL. This won't be tracked because there was no click event. This issue will also apply to users that click the category in the submenu that prefills the filter.
Option 2 also is an issue because with this solution the category might be tracked 5 times if the user keeps adding or removing other filters. It always tracks all filters instead of the one that has been added.
The first step of tracking is using the analog of Occam's Razor. You want to cut off stuff that has no chance of answering legit business questions.
Your business question here is: What filters are the most helpful for the users? Now it's important to know why the business wants to know it. Cuz remember, the business is not very competent at data analysis even if it doesn't realize it.
So you need to know exactly how answering that question improves OKRs/KPIs. In this case, the legit answer could be: cuz we want to sort the filters by the usage frequency and measure if that would ease the engagement and thus, improve the conversion rate for the part of the journey from the product list to the pdp
That's a pretty weak reason, but passable. Especially if there's an issue in that transition currently.
Good, now having that context, why would we want to track filters used in pre-populated urls? Say some overzealous employee made a mistake and pre-populated some weird unneeded filter using, say, date and time of when the product has been added. And now they use that URL in all ads, so you get a lot of third party traffic coming to product lists with a date as a filter.
And then, let's say, that employee keeps using that filter for other persistent links to the effect of the date/time filter becoming uncanningly popular. There. Your data slowly becomes garbage and stops answering the original question.
There are other issues with tracking pre-set filters, some of which you've outlined, but the real issue is the ability of the data to answer good business questions clearly. Tracking all filters may be able to answer some technical questions, but it's not the aim of behavioral analytics to answer technical questions. Let them use access logs and whatever else they use to answer those.
I know that it might be odd, but I need your help with the google analytics set up.
Task: I need to set up brochure downloads as a goal for international students on a page https://www.cqu.edu.au/international-students/international-brochures .
In a perfect world, I would need to set up an individual goal for each type of brochure download (postgraduation, undergraduate, English courses) but I decided to start from "all brochures" to save the number of goals that I have for the view. Unfortunately, I don't have a chance to set up "events", so I have to work with goals only.
Final goal destination: Any page containing "pdf_file" in its description.
Pathway: come to International section, move to brochures, then go to brochure page (containing "pdf_file" in its description, for ex. - https://www.cqu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/158540/2017-Undergraduate-International-Guide.pdf).
The problem: I tried to use regular expressions such as "^/__data/assets/pdf_file/." or ^/pdf_file/(.) and I can't see conversions in real time test.
However, nothing helped, and goals (even the page visit) still aren't tracking correctly. What am I doing wrong? And, if possible, how can I split goals across different brochure types?
Many thanks,
Kirill
You are on the right track. You just need one Goal. The problem you have is that after clicking a pdf document you are being redirected to a PDF viewer iframe. This is a PDF view "page" with no Google analytics tracking code whatsoever.If you use are using destination goals the only way this will work is by having installed the Google Analytics (GA) tracking code at the "final destination page".
One way to track pdf "views" is by creating a short url for each one, hence you will be able to track or check how many of them have views.
Another way is to create an onclick event within each link. But this is only possible if you can setup the events in GA. Creating this kind of event tracking will allow you to set up labels for each pdf's name to be able to identify or track each one of them.
Situation: I have used Google Tag Manager to set up Google Analytics (GA - Universal) on a multisite network. There is one GTM container, and each website has its own GA property. I used a GTM variable to reference all of the GA properties. I am able to track cross-domain sessions. In testing, I am able to follow a user's session across multiple domains under the same session / client ID.
Problem: I'm stuck with what to do next. I'd like to create some Goals and Views that track a user's journey through my sites and measure the usual stats (bounce, drop-off points conversions, etc.). However, I'm not sure where to begin. I see plenty of information on the Internet for how to set up cross-domain GA tags in GTM. However, I don't see anything out there for how to create Views and Goals for cross-domain setups. A few questions that come to mind are:
Do I create Goals in the destination site's GA account (e.g. mycheckout.com), or the site where the session begins (e.g. myproductinfo.com)?
When creating Goals, do I only use the permalink slug, or the entire link? I thought I could only add the permalink.
How does this information roll up into one report?
I found this link, but I'm not sure if it's the 'best practice'. I would greatly appreciate it if someone who has previously implemented this could provide an outline of best practices, or a link to a good tutorial on the subject.
Thanks for your help!
Chris
You need to understand GA definition of Views and Properties. Views are like database table views: you can either show the whole table or a sample of it.
To have all data collected without sampling a "Raw Data" view (no filters) should always be used. Each view has its own conversion goal definitions. So in the "Raw Data" view you can create a goal for any page tracked. If you filter a view for one domain (e.g. "confirmation.com View with appropriate filters"), only goals for this domain should be created (otherwise they will never count a conversion).
When creating goals you can define filters for the "ga:pagePath" parameter. So it depends on your GA tracking setup, what part of the URL it tracks. Go into chrome web developer toolbar and hit the "network" tab. Open your page in this tab. Then search for requests ending with "collect", these are the data trackpoints send to GA. There you can debug what URL information is sent to GA (search for the "dl" parameter within the query string parameters list).
I'll use StackOverflow as an example.
A user can reach a question/answer page from
outside of stackoverflow
from another page of stackoverflow
from a search result
from a link in other posts (link in another question or answer)
from Similar Questions section
from a user profile page
I'd like to know how those internal links are used.
Main question is What are the percentages of each type of links which led users to the Q/A page in stackoverflow
I want to know the answer for the Q/A pages as a whole not for each individual Q/A page.
Is this implementable using GA and if so, I'd like to hear a general guide so I can dig in.
Is there a term for this kind of analysis? (internal link analysis? Knowning a term helps me to google further..)
Edit
I found one way to do this using sitesearch.
http://cutroni.com/blog/2010/03/30/tracking-internal-campaigns-with-google-analytics/
It's from 2010, and not sure its still the best way to do it.
To be able to tell different links from the same page e.g. you will need to setup enhanced link attribution by requiring the plugin via this command
ga('require', 'linkid', 'linkid.js');
the plugin also requires decorating each link that reffers to the same destination (the question) a unique id. you can also chose to decorate a container element such as a div which holds link or its parent (up to 5 levels)
there are a number of ways to get at this data.
One way is a under reporting look at Behavior>Behavior Flow. The view crates a sunkey diagram. which you can narrow down using a custom segment + creating a content grouping. The advantage of the Behavior flow is that it is visual - but it is difficult to customize.
Another approach you could take is to locate the question in the Behavior > Site Content>All pages and the set the secondary dimension to "Previous Page Path". You can use the advanced filter to select a specific question, and to limit the previous pages to page paths matching the pattern for each type of page you discussed.
To view the attribution for different links you need to select the In-Page Analytics tab.
FYI, I've implemented it using Google tag manager.
I defined event navigateToQnA.
And fired the event with different event action for different type of clicks I care about.
Maybe bit laborious than the sitesearch method I linked in the question.
But cleaner in a sense that you don't pollute url parameters to collect the data.
I've recently learned about the new Google Analytics Content Experiments which looks interesting. ( http://analytics.blogspot.nl/2012/06/helping-to-create-better-websites.html )
The standard usecase seems to be that for a certain page, say a product detail page, you supply variations (different urls) and select a percentage of users that are included in the test. Such a user will be presented a variation of the product-detail page (and will continue to be presented the same variation over and over for continuation/ux reasons, based on cookies presumably) .
All fine and good.
However, say I have 100 products on my site. Just testing a variation on 1 of those products has imho the following disadvantages:
slow progressing tests because of lower nr of visitors.
the test isn't isolated. I.e: since other product detail pages aren't included in the test, displaying a variation-page for 1 product-detail page while all other product-detail pages show the original can (will) lead to a confusing experience (and thus skewed conversion statistics) for the user that browses multiple products, which most of them do.
To me it seems far better to be able to dynamically include all products of a certain type into the same test (e.g: all TV's) , for example by enabling to set some regular expression or other filter on urls to include in the test.
Is such a thing possible currently, scheduled, useful, or completely missing the point?
EDIT
Part of the solution seems to be "relative urls"
https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664470
Taking the previous example one step further, we can see how the use
of relative URLs lets you easily run an experiment on a set of
different original pages, and test visual alternatives across that
group of pages (e.g., the product pages in an e-commerce site).
Remaining question: How to dynamically tag which pages belong to the experiment (e.g: based on regex)
Thanks.
The solution is to use relative url for the variation page.
E.g. you have a number of product pages:
www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html
www.mysite.com/products/cheese.html
www.mysite.com/products/bread.html
etc.
For each page you have a matching variation page:
www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html?var=bigpicture
www.mysite.com/products/cheese.html?var=bigpicture
www.mysite.com/products/bread.html?var=bigpicture
etc.
You want to use all the product pages in 1 experiment.
Go To google Analytics Content Experiments:
For the orginal page choose ONE of the many product pages (e.g. www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html) (This is just to get the experiment code and provide GA with an example page)
For the variation page choose relative url and put ?var=bigpicture
Then place the javascript required for the experiment on ALL the original product pages you want in the experiment
For more information see: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664470&topic=1745208&ctx=topic
Use the Javascript API as described here:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/experiments#pro-server
You can set the experimentid programmatically in your code, on every page. Of course you need first to create the experiment in GA, in doing so provide GA fake urls for each variation, discard the GA generated code, ignore the validation errors.
And just use the experimentid as described in the link above.
OK, so a solution to this is:
Create experiment.
Chose a placeholder url for your original url. Something like www.example.com/products/eggs. Set variations as relative urls eg ?var=large_heading, ?var=small_price
Have some mechanism on the server-side which determines if the current user is part of the experiment. A simple cookie is good enough. If this cookie is present show a variation of the page.
If the user visits a product page but isn't in an experiment then show the javascript given when you created an experiment.
Add something to your product page which checks for the querystring var=[something]. When detected show the appropriate variation as well as setting the cookie which tells marks the user as being in an experiment.
You can hack around the JavaScript that Google gives you to make this a bit easier. Something like:
var variation = utmx('variation_code', 'A/B');
if (variation) { set_a_cookie(variation); }
utmx('url', 'A/B');
This is largely cribbed from the GWO Techie Guide. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//websiteoptimizer/techieguide.pdf
There is also a way to the A/B testing with GA without experiment API if you really want to keep things simple. The idea behind it is to create your own split parameter and than you can pass it to GA as a custom variable. So you can yous your own development tools to differentiate the content in the groups and you don't have to use redirect. Here is a simple tutorial how to do this: link.
I recently implemented a GA experiment to test out different text on a nav bar across many pages. This is what worked for me:
Set up the experiment in GA for a single page. E.g. index.html and
index.html?var=menu2.
Implement the solution across multiple pages. Specifically,
insert the GA experiment code in all the pages
that you want to run
the test. Then ensure that your page(s) can render the page
variation based on the parameter passed. My php code went something
like this: If var=menu2, display page with menu2; otherwise,
display original menu.