changing URLs in Google Analytics
by Jon
John Henson from Lunametrics demonstrated an excellent method for adding page titles as a second dimension in the content report of Google Analytics. However, this doesn’t work in the new version of Google Analytics as the form of the URL has changed substantially, so I experimented with the new format of url and the video shows how I did it.
To use this method, go to your content report, click on page title then back to page above the data table. You can see either pageTitle or pagePath at the end of the url, eg
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/#report/content-pages/……explorer-segmentExplorer.segmentId%3Danalytics.pagePath/
Select source as a secondary dimension from the dropdown, look for this at the end of the url and presuming you are on the URL report, change analytics.source to analytics.pageTitle. Hit return and POW – both page and page title on the same report
The important parts are
analytics.pagePath – the path (request_URI in the original Lunametrics example)
analytics.pageTitle – the page title (page_title in the original Lunametrics example)
You can also swap these around to segment the title by the path.
Why would you do this? there are SEO reasons as John mentioned in the original post. I’m using it to work out which pages are which in a third party application, and to check if all the dynamic URLs have page titles before applying a rewrite.
This method can also be used to change other dimensions in the URL that are not available from the second dimension dropdown, though if you want to be able to access the report regularly, take the information you’ve used and create custom reports.
Do you have any examples of changing the url in the new version of Google Analytics to improve reports?
5 comments on ‘changing URLs in Google Analytics’