Google Analytics: How to segment by many groups of pages

2
votes

I'm working on a site where we have many page groups, with a similar URL scheme for each one, along the lines of 

/groupa/page1 /groupa/page2 /groupa/page3

/groupb/page1 /groupb/page2 /groupb/page3

generally users will be visiting only a single group per visit, but they will sometimes visit multiple groups. We want to be able to track for each group how many people visited it. Ideally it would also be nice to see how often people visited page1 page2 page3 (etc) regardless of group. The second one should be easy to do with custom variables, but I'm not sure how to proceed with the 1st one.

We've tried to implement it with custom variables, but have run into the problem of associating multiple "group visits" with a visit. An event has the same issue, as we want to effectively only have 1 instance per group per session.

How can I implement this? I'm open to suggestions involving further tracking events on the page or some sort of filtering within the analytics app itself. It can be assumed that the group name will be the first segment of the URL after the root URL if that helps.

Update based on comments:

I've now tried solving this with custom content groups and segments.

Segments allow me to view the information the way I want (I can see visits which include a pageview within a certain group), but I can only view 4 of them at a time. I want to view a table of these segments. I also can't define these programmatically based on URLs and would need to add one for each new group.

Content groups allow me to define groups programmatically, but can only be associated with page views. I see no way to see "visits which included a view of a page in this content group" which is really what I want.

To clarify I want to see a table like this, where a visit is "a visit where the user visited a page within a given group" So the sum of the visits column may be greater than the total # of visits since visits may be counted twice.

groupname | visits 
===================
groupa   | 100
groupb   | 90
groupc   | 75

I would prefer a solution that can be seen within the app, but can also work with something that requires the API. I'm also fine with solutions that involve upgrading to GAs new universal analytics platform, but please specify if that is required.

1
google-analytics
Have you looked at content groupings? Sounds like this might do the trick. - Blexy
I did end up looking at them. Unfortunately they allow you to segment by pageview, while I really want to do so by visit. As of right now I'm resporting to storing the group names using session storage, and then passing them as a custom variable separated by | for each group. Its ugly, but should at least allow me to see the view I want. - Ben McCormick
I might be missing something, but why would segmentation not work , i.e. new segment->include->visits->condition: page contains groupa ? That would show all visitors who have visited (a page within) group A and can be applied to all reports. - Eike Pierstorff
@EikePierstorff the main issue here is we're talking upwards of 80 groups here with the number growing all the time. Manually specifying a new segment every time we add a new group is not a good solution. We need something we can automate, either with a custom variable/event on the page, or with a regex on the URL. - Ben McCormick
@BenMcCormick, anything extracted from the url will always be page scope so that's not quite want you want (of course you can use it as a proxy for visits via segmentation). As for custom variables, a session scope variable will always hold only one value per session so you wont associate multiple "group visits" with a visit. The problem, if there is one, would be rather that you only ever capture the last group visited (since previous values will be overwritten). - Eike Pierstorff

1 Answers

3
votes

Go to you admin panel and make sure you select the correct view that you want track. The view is the last column to the right.

This is very new stuff! You will need to go to "Content Grouping" and create new grouping. Once you create the new grouping, you will be asked how to filter the grouping. You should choose "Group using rule definitions" and then add in your pages.

There is also an option where you can add specific tracking snippets to pages and group them as you like. This is the "Enable Tracking Code" option.

*Addition From the comments *

I saw your comment about content groups. When you are looking at page level data, you should be looking at pageviews and not visits. That is the number of times a page was viewed (doesn't matter if it was the same person). Use unique pageviews to understand how many times a page was visited during a session. That will give you how many times those pages/groups of pages where visited by a visitor.