Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Setting up Google Analytics default URL
-
If someone has set:
-
the default url in Google Analytics to a non-www address (http://mysite.com)
-
then placed the UA tracking script from that GA account within the CMS framework of the website...
-
... and then set the permanent 301 redirect in the htaccess file to redirect to the www address (http://www.mysite.com).
How less accurrate will my GA analytics measurements be considering the default url within GA is non-www and the permanent 301 redirect in htacess is to the www-address?
Anyone know how reliable GA reports are until the default url in GA analytics is changed to match what is the redirected url in htaccess file?
_Cindy
-
-
Got it, very helpful - thanks so much!
_Cindy
-
Hostname injection is when you add the hostname value to the beginning of the content URI. Instead of seeing just '/index.html' in the content URI reports, you would see 'www.mysite.com/index.html'. This is helpful when you are tracking across multiple subdomains and you need to tell the difference between files on your different subdomains. You would see the following, as an example:
www.mysite.com/index.html
blog.mysite.com/index.html
store.mysite.com/index.html3 different pages on different subdomains. Without adding the hostname, they would have rolled up into a single '/index.html' line and it would be difficult to know which subdomains they are from.
More info on setting up the filter can be found here:
-
OK, thank you.
If I understand correctly, the tracking code for a single site did the work of tracking visitors, and the 301 redirect didn't change the tracking results -- even though the "301 redirected address" was at one time different from the "GA default url."
If I may ask, what is a hostname injection? And if possible please explain a use case example where hostname injection is used.
_Cindy
-
The 'Default URL' field in a Property Settings screen will do a few different things:
- Prefill a setDomainName value for your tracking code if you select tracking for multiple subdomains or domains. I'm just noting in here, since none of what you described would be a cookie domain issue.
- The Default URL would be would be prepended to the content URI when you are viewing content reports and click the icon to view the page in a new window.
What I'll emphasize is that your Default URL value will have no effect on your data collection. It's simply not used in any data processing. There are many use cases for having an empty Default URL, for example, if you are doing a hostname injection into your content URIs and you don't need another hostname prepended when you attempt to open a content URI in a new window, like I described in the 2nd option.
Hope this helps.
-
Everything is consistent now - 301 redirect to www, default url in GA set to www.
Tracking code has remained the same within cms because the GA account's url was changed to go to www.
It is a matter of too many chefs in kitchen and no one had control of entire picture at one point.
My question really is... when there was inconsistency in web address from 301 redirect (www-address) and the GA default url (non-www), why was GA still receiving traffic?
And how much can one rely on older metrics when this inconsistency was in place?
_Cindy
-
Hi Cindy -
Why would you set the default URL to non-www, and then set GA to track the WWW address? I think you should send all your traffic and tracking to one or the other. That's the first step in cleaning this up.
I would suggest mapping everything to the www version as you have this set in for your 301. Sooner than later would be best to get accurate tracking started.
oh - and fix the tracking code - to include the WWW version and not the non-www. That also needs fixing.
Cheers, Rob
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to change domains in Google Analytics without losing the data
Hi there, We recently changed our domain from .COM to .NET so that all our subdomains from external pages matched. Right now in Google Console we have our new .NET website being tracked, but in GA we are still tracking .COM. It is also causing issues with MOZ crawling our site because of the .COM/.NET discrepancy. My question is what is the best way to change our Google Analytics from .COM to .NET without losing historical data and what considerations do we need to change before implementing this? Our team was concerned that just downloading the old data would be too vast and it we wouldn't be able to continue manipulating it dynamically in GA. Thanks!!
Reporting & Analytics | | cPanel-LLC.0 -
Would updating Meta Titles affect Google analytics tracking?
Hi All, I need a little bit of help. We need to optimize our blog's articles Meta titles for SEO which all exceed 100 characters. I was told that if we change the titles, google analytics would split the tracking pages and count the data as 2 pages (old title and new title). Has any of you have this experience before and if so, is there a way to avoid google analytics counting this as two pages? Thanks in advance! Viviana http://analyteguru.com/ http://analyteguru.com/ http://analyteguru.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | mchoi0 -
Direct traffic spam on Google Analytics: how can you identify and filter it?
One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month. The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate. I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics. However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam. Are there recommendations for filtering this out? Can I identify spam IP addresses?
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Google Analytics: Different stats for date range vs single month?
I've been scratching my head, chin, and you name it over this one. I have an advanced segment to remove bot traffic from my data. When I look at the Audience Overview data for a single month (let's say Aug). I am shown a session count. No problems here, however If I set the date range to (January - August). The august monthly stats is incorrect, much lower. What this means is that, if I export a CSV report from Jan-Aug, the data is wrong compared to individually recording a month. Anyone faced this? I've asked the question over at the Google Analytics technical section as well, but no answer P.S I even used the 'control the number of sessions used to calculate this report' tool but no luck.
Reporting & Analytics | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
How does switching to HTTPS effect Google Analytics?
We are looking at making our site HTTPS. We have been using the same Google Analytics account for years and I like having the historical data. All of our pages will be the same, we are just going to redirect from the http to https. Does anything need to be done with Google Analytics? What about other addons such as Optimizely, Crazy Egg, or Share this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Localhost:4444 Showing Up in Google Analytics
Hello All, Lately in my Google Analytics account I have noticed a referral source labelled: localhost:4444 The number of visits is really high from this source, but I have no idea (no clue!) what it actually means. Can anyone shed some light on what this is about? Should I be creating some sort of filter to screen out this as a referral source (assuming it is not legitimate)? Many thanks in advance. Cheers!
Reporting & Analytics | | Robert-B0 -
How to remove unwanted dynamic parameters from a URL in Google Analytics
Hi, Would really appreciate some help with this. I have been experimenting with RegEx to achieve this but as I’ve never used it before am currently failing miserably. We have conversion pages i need to set goals for that are formatted as below: https://www.domain.co.uk//Application_Form/(S(ewhbqp5cki0mppuzukunkqno))/enterCardDetails.aspx I need to remove the (s(xxx)) section from the URL as rather than one pages i currently have thousands of unique URL's. What’s catching me out is that as it’s not a URL parameter I can’t discount and as half way through can’t just do head matches etc to /entercarddetails Help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sarbs0