If you use a mailing list or drive traffic to your site from affiliates, your Google Analytics data may not be giving you the full picture of the number of hits you are getting to each page. This is because Google Analytics treats a regular URL (like "yoursite.com/page/") and a URL with a query string (like "yoursite.com/page/?contact_key=s8dg3n22dgh" or "yoursite.com/page/?aff_id=3451") as different pages. In order for Analytics to see them as the same page, we must eliminate that string from the end of the URL. In this video, I’ll show you how to do just that!
Some things from the video to remember:
To set up a narrow search, such as mailing list info or affiliate ID:
- Go to Admin > VIEW (PROFILE) > View Settings
- Put the variable name (the thing between the ? and the = in the string) in the box that says "Exclude URL Query Parameters"
- Click Save.
To set up a broad filter:
- Go to Admin > VIEW (PROFILE) > Filters
- Click "+ New Filter"
- Use these settings:
- Filter Type: Custom Filter, Search and Replace
- Filter Field: Request URI
- Search String: ^([^\?]+)\?.*
- Replace String: /
- Case Sensitive: No