Showing Page Titles & URLs in Google Analytics
Posted on July 15, 2010 by John
Sometimes when presenting a report to someone else, you may want to display a list of pages as Page Titles instead of URLs. But you still want to filter the list to show only certain pages. And you want to filter the list to only show certain pages based on the URL.
In the screenshot below, I am displaying a report by URL and as the
Secondary Dimension I have selected Page Title. The filter at the bottom of the report works on the First Column and I have filtered the report to a particular subdirectory.
So far this looks pretty straight forward, right?
THE CATCH:
The catch is, in GA, there is no option to select Page Title as a Secondary Dimension in the URL report.
This means that if you want to display the pages by Page Title for only a sub-directory, you’d have to come up with a very convoluted filter to filter in every page title in that subdirectory and at the same time remove unwanted positive matches from other sub-directories.
So how did I get URL and Page Title to show up in the same report?
The trick is in using a URL parameter called “segkey” which you add to the URL in the address bar for the report. For reference, I’ve included the report URL below (Note that I xxx’d out the ID for the profile):
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/top_content?id=xxxxxx&pdr=20100515-20100614&cmp=average&trows=10&gdfmt=nth_day&rpt=TopContentReport&segkey=request_uri|page_title&tab=0&tchcol=0&tst=0&tscol=v0&tsdir=0&mdet=WORLD&midx=0&gidx=0&glcnt=1#lts=1276612598642
Step 1: Generate your Top Content Report
Step 2: Copy and Paste &segkey=request_uri|page_title into the url in the query parameter section of the URL (amidst the other & parameters)
Step 3: Press enter and enjoy your report.
There are a couple of reasons, from an SEO perspective, that you may want to show both the page URI and page title together.
1. Find duplicate title tags – If you’re looking at a specific section of your site, like in the example above, you can quickly see how targeted your title tags are. You might even find duplicate title tags. In the example above, you can see we have two pages with the same title tag – #4 and #8. Each page on your site should have a different title tag, and this gives you the opportunity to be more specific and target more long-tail search terms.
2. Monitor & Measure – If you’ve changed the title tag on a page, you can filter to contain just the URI for that page, then show a month before and a month after the change to see if traffic to that page has increased or decreased.
Thanks to
Jim for the “Other reasons to do this” section, and thanks to
Christina for helping me to rewrite parts of the post.
Related Posts
- The case for (and against) on-page analytics
- Google Analytics: Worst Titles Ever
- Funnel Problems in Google Analytics
- How To Identify Query Parameters With Google Analytics
- How to Find Goal Conversions by Landing Page
by John | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
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Nice work, so very useful.
Could you use a hack like this to extract Referrer URI.
One piece of info I’ve always been keep to get is “Referrer URI” following by “Requested URI”.
E.g. if this blog post sends 3 visitors to my site, I’d like to know
a) That it was this blog post
and
b) Which page on my site it linked to.
Do you reckon this is possible?
Regards,
Des
I don’t know if that is possible or not.
GA seems to keep the referrer URL in 2 parts, the Source and the Referral Path.
But since those are both visit level dimensions, I’m not sure that they would pair well with pageview level dimensions.
It might be possible to do something with a custom report where you started showing Landing Page and drilled down to see Source + Referral Path. But this isn’t something I can remember doing.
If I get some time I’ll see if I can give that a try. Or if you end up trying it out, let us know how it worked (or didn’t).
John
Hello,
Where can I find the the query parameter section of the URL (amidst the other & parameters)? I am logged in to GA as an administrator and am basically new at this.
Any help is much appreciated!
Laura
Step 1: Generate your Top Content Report
Step 2: Copy and Paste &segkey=request_uri|page_title into the url in the query parameter section of the URL (amidst the other & parameters)
Step 3: Press enter and enjoy your report.
A query parameter is the part of the URL that is after the path. The first query parameter is denoted by a question mark (?) and subsequent query parameters are denoted by an ampersand (&).