Make Your Content Reports More Useful

Here's another practitioner-focused approach from James Tipton, one of our specialists in New York.

A Web Analyst is on an eternal quest to understand content consumption. When Visitors come to your site, what do they read? What fascinates them? What do they find depressing?

In this quest, the Google Analytics' Top Content report can be powerful and full of insights. But depending on your website platform and use of URL parameters, it can also appear cluttered and, in rare cases, confusing.

For example, dynamically generated query parameters, such as session IDs, can exponentially increase the number of URL's displayed and may even result in the unhelpful "other" listing in your content reports. As a result, the report may no longer be instantly useful when you look at it.

In your Top Content report, “other” shows up when your website data contains more than 50,000 unique URL’s for a given day. It is important to point out that there are no pageview limits, only limits to the number of unique URL's that can be displayed in the report. So no matter how many times your pages are viewed, data is still captured, processed and presented correctly. The "other" category comes into play only when more than 50,000 unique URL's are registered.

You may be thinking that 50,000 unique URL's on a single day seems like a lot. But you may be surprised at how quickly multiple sets of query parameters can cause your site to reach that limit. It goes without saying that trying to evaluate the bounce rate, exit percentage, time on page and other such lovely metrics for that many pages can be a daunting task. Seeing the "other" category can create an even bigger challenge, and take away from your quest for the long tail in your data.

Luckily, Google Analytics has a couple of simple solutions for cleaning up unnecessary URL parameters from your content reports.

Let’s assume that our website is www.example.com and our product pages' URL's look like this:

www.example.com/products/awesomeproductpage.html?sid=ap5829g2k&param=supervalue

In this case both "sid" and "param" in the URL above are URL parameters, and both are being added to the URL by the website platform (and hence they're unnecessary).

So how do you keep your Google Analytics reports clean and useful?

The first way to address unnecessary parameters is to use the Main Profile Settings in your account.

Here are the steps:

1. Click into the "Profile Settings" page and then on "Edit" in the "Main Profile Settings Information" bar.
   
   
2. Enter the query parameters you'd like to exclude in the "Exclude URL Query Parameters" field and click "Save Changes."

Note that in the Exclude URL Query Parameters area we have added sid and param, since we want them filtered out.

Advice: We recommend that you always maintain an unfiltered "master" profile, because you never know when you may need to see those parameters. When you exclude parameters, do so in a duplicate profile. Then you can relax knowing you won't be caught off-guard.

The second way to address non-essential parameters is to use the features within the Internal Site Search set-up and use the Internal Site Search admin panel.

To enable Site Search, click on "Edit" under the "Settings" column next to the name of the profile on your analytics Settings page. Next, Click "Do Track Site Search" and, after you fill in the appropriate query parameter ("query" in the example below) in the Query Parameter field, select "Yes, strip query parameters out of URL."

Then hit Save. Going forward all the URL parameters will be removed, presenting you with a clean list of URL's you can better understand in your Google Analytics report.

Speaking of Site Search: if you haven't activated Site Search yet, do it today. It only takes seconds (OK, maybe a couple of minutes) but it's well worth the small effort needed.

So when do you use each of the above recommended methods?

Use method one, Main Profile Settings, when you want exclude just some of the parameters.

Use method two, Internal Site Search Settings, when you want to exclude all the parameters.

In closing, excluding query parameters from your profile will dramatically reduce the number of unique URL's you have to sift through and make the Top Content report immediately useful. Now, rather than hundreds of distinct URL's all pointing to the same page, you may see a single entry per page. That means you'll spend less time de-duping URL's and more time evaluating them.

Good luck, and happy data hunting!


Posted by James Tipton, Google Analytics Team