Google Analytics - Custom Variables
-
Hi guys,
I'd appreciate any advice with this one.
At the moment I'm in the process of arranging a URL re-structure. I was wondering what the best way would be to track the performance of the old URLs against new ones?
We will be ammending the URLs for any new property pages which go live on our website but leaving the old URLs in play for any old properties listed. We're taking this approach for the moment so we can conduct analysis on the change.
It has been mentioned to me that placing a 'setvariable' in the code of pages with the old URLs and ones with the new URLs would be a way of tracking performance. However, my knowledge in this area is a little bit grey.
Any advice?
Cheers,
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
Have you considered using Google Experiments in Google Analytics to test the pages? You can test variations of pages and their effectiveness by simply entering the different URLs - https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1745147&topic=1745207
(Experiments is under the Content Menu in Google Analytics)
If you want to go down the custom variable route here is a great how to that should explain it all simply for you (I used it myself) -
http://www.sitepoint.com/google-analytics-custom-variables/
What are you going to be measuring, in terms of performance, in order to be able to judge which page type has been more successful?
The reason I ask is because I am trying to understand how you will define one page type performing better than another.
-
Why not use Advanced Segments? You can find more detailed information here: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033017
For example, if your old URLs looks like:
www.mysite.com/old.php?cat=12&pid=113
And the new ones looks like
www.mysite.com/category-12/product-113
You can easily create advanced segments to monitor the performance.
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 confused by trailing slash
My client has a page with the URL https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training/. Google won't index this page because it has detected a canonical at https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training (without the trailing slash). I can't find https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training without the trailing slash anywhere in our site. All the other page URLs end with the slash. How do I sort this out and convince Google that https://www.corptexsystems.ca/training/ is the version to index? Thanks in advance for your help, SEO masters! -AK
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Page missing from Google index
Hi all, One of our most important pages seems to be missing from the Google index. A number of our collections pages (e.g., http://perfectlinens.com/collections/size-king) are thin, so we've included a canonical reference in all of them to the main collection page (http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all). However, I don't see the main collection page in any Google search result. When I search using "info:http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all", the page displayed is our homepage. Why is this happening? The main collection page has a rel=canonical reference to itself (auto-generated by Shopify so I can't control that). Thanks! WUKeBVB
Technical SEO | | leo920 -
What does Google PageSpeed measure?
What does the PageSpeed tool actually measure? Does it say that a webserver is fast or slow? Thanks in advanced!
Technical SEO | | DanielMulderNL0 -
Google Structured Data Problem
Hello everyone, About 1-2 weeks ago, I have implemented rich snippets (microdata) for the product pages of my e-commerce site. However, in the web masters tools, google is saying that the crawlers did not detect any structured data in my site. I have also checked my pages using Structured Data Testing Tool. You can see an example test result in the following address. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tarzimon.com%2Fproduct%2Fnaif-tasarim-torr-aydinlatma-1031 What may cause this problem? Thank you for your help
Technical SEO | | hknkynr0 -
Google bot notification
Hi there! I've just made some changes in my website in order to optimize it but I don't know if there's a way to notify the googlebot that some aspects of the configuration (metas) have changed and must be "taken into account". The spider visited my site two days ago and obviously processed the sitemap file. I've heard that it's possible to do a ping to certain websites. Is this the way to proceed? I must say that there're not many updates in the site (just one way information) as the social media activity is still low. Thanks in advanced.
Technical SEO | | juanmiguelcr0 -
How to correct a google canonical issue?
So when I initially launched my website I had an issue where I didn't properly set my canonical tags and all my pages got crawled. Now in looking at the search engine results I see a number of the pages that were meant to be canonical tagged to the correct page showing up in the results. What is the best way to correct this issue with google? Also I noticed that while initially I was ranking well for the main pages, now those results have disappeared entirely and deeper in the rankings I am finding the pages that were meant to be canonical tagged. Please Help.
Technical SEO | | jackaveli0 -
Google description problem
Hi all, My website is www.ipbskinning.com I'm having a problem with how my site is appearing in google. I have this in the head of my website: <meta name='<a class="attribute-value">description</a>' content='<a class="attribute-value">Free and Custom IPB Skins for Invision Power Board.</a>'/> Yet when I google 'ipbskinning' it says: Solid Skins. 1We test all our skins in all browsers to insure that they are compatible. This ensures that your users have the best user experience. which is random text from the content of my site. Any idea why this is happening? Thanks a lot all
Technical SEO | | pezza34340