Creating a Filter in GA to track Parent Category
-
I don't know if the title makes sense, but here's my question...
Our newspaper website has multiple categories like World, Sport, Entertainment etc. Now, a story, belonging to the entertainment section maybe published on the entertainment page but is likely to have a slot somewhere on the Home page as well as other pages. The same goes for stories in sport etc. However, the url displays the date folllowed by the post title and thats it, no category name.
Now, a user may end up going to a detailed story that belongs to the entertainment section (from the home page or any other page) without actually having visited the entertainment page. However, for tracking purposes, we want to see how many hits we got on the entertainment page and any story belonging to that particular section. So, my question is how do I go about creating filters that can help me track category page and detail story hits as one? Or, should I ammend the url structure (keep in mind we are using wordpress for our news website) to include category after the date and would this solve my problem of tracking?
I asked a similar question recently but maybe I did not explain myself clearly.
Thanks!
-
Your answer raises many more questions!
-
Hi Rishad,
CustomVars are your best friend for this : http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html
Right before calling trackPageView, set a custom variable (with a page-level scope, which is the level #3) to store the category of the story :
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
1, // This is the slot number. Read the doc for this, since you only have 5 slots available.
'Category', // This is the name of your custom variable.
'Sports', // This is the value of your custom variable.
3 // This is the scope. Use the page-level scope for your use case. Read the doc to fully understand this.
]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);You will then be able to create a report using this new custom variable to count the number of visitors and pageviews per category.
Hope this helps,
J.
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
-
Google analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
The best way to track internal links in Google Analytics
Hi there, we are a retail business and we have invested in quality editorial content which sits in our Blog at ourwebsite.co.uk/blog/ The Blog links to the main site (an online store) and I want to track the 'value' of the blog by how many clicks the blog content generates back to the main store. At the moment we're using this code on the end of every link in the Blog: ?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Widget&utm_campaign=FromBlog Does this affect SEO and is there a better way of doing it? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Bee1590 -
Multiple GA codes, one site.
Hi all, Is anyone running two GA codes on one website successfully? My organisation own a number of websites so we used to have one global GA code on all our sites to track global stats, and then we would also have site unique GA on each property to just track that one property. This worked fine, but of late we seem to be getting no data from the globally based code. Obviously, with the site-specific codes we can enter the name for that domain in GA but for the overall code, it is called 'all.com' I'm wondering if Google has now tied the GA domain to the code or if we are doing something wrong. All the codes are the same as they always were but have stopped working. As a stop gap, we have swapped to using Piwik as the all.com code. However, we are then comparing the stats in two different analytics programs so will get a different result. Also, it would be nice to be able to add the all.com to tools such as this to generate weekly reports. Anyone else having GA woe like this? Thanks. Carl
Reporting & Analytics | | WonkyDog0 -
Google Analytics View Filters
Using the same GA property, I would like to set up three filtered views: 1. Tracking across one subdomain and one primary domain (example: shop.example.com & example.com) 2. Track only primary domain (example.com) 3. Track only subdomain (shop.example.com) Can this be achieved by using view filters? If so, how do they need to be set? Also, according to this article: https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-subdomain-tracking-in-google-analytics, with cross domain tracking, I need to ignore self-referrals, which can only be done at the property level. If set up to ignore example.com referrals, will this cause problems with filter 2 and 3?
Reporting & Analytics | | Evan340 -
Virtual Pageviews vs. Destination URL for Goal tracking
I am working on setting up goal tracking. Currently when we receive a new signup, the person gets sent to their dashboard homepage and this is not a valuable a goal tracking destination. My suggestion was to build a "Welcome" interstitial page to send a user to when they create an account. Our tech team suggested using a Virtual pageview instead as it is their thinking that a "Welcome" page adds little value. Is there any downside to using Virtual Pageviews with regards to goal tracking?
Reporting & Analytics | | Vacatia_SEO
Are interstitial page more reliable?
Can you still use funnel visualization with Virtual Pageviews?0 -
Images Getting Indexed Making for Low Engagements Times in GA
I have quite a few images that are being indexed for popular search terms and are getting clicks. This site has a 0-10 second engagement of 69%. I would like to eliminate these images from the equation because I tend to think they are hurting my "quality score" in organic Google rankings. How do you keep these images from ranking? I suppose I could rename them. Should I disallow the images folder? I hate to do that, because some of my images turn up in local searches, which is good. I would rather keep those. But what is best practice? A little background info, this is a local service site. So the images that are ranking are coming up for a broad national type search. This has 0 value for the site. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated, Thanks! Kathy
Reporting & Analytics | | MSWD0 -
Filter out IP address of Site Search analytics
Hi Mozzers, I have a filter that excludes all internal traffic from my sites. But this does not seem to work on site search > Search Terms See here:- http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/analytics/filter$20site$20search/analytics/pO18L31hEO4/tJ3lKVNT3YYJ Any ideas? Or is it a bug, etc Thanks S
Reporting & Analytics | | Metropolis0 -
Is IP tracking of visitor allowed?
Hi, Google Analytics does not provide IP addresss of the visitors. What if i develop some in-house tracking mechanism to do so? Is it allowed or will Google penalize me if it comes to know about it? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | IM_Learner0