Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 42 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Highlights from Friday’s updates:
More Tweets from People You Don’t Follow
One Big Article, Or Lots of Small Ones? (For SEO)
Key Stats Added to Google Analytics 4
Contents
Tip: Should I Use Page Path or Page Title?
Analysis: Our Little Secret About the GA4 page_view Event
Tip: Should I Use Page Path or Page Title?
Page path is everything that comes after the .com, .net, etc. of a URL.
Page title is, well, the page’s title, usually determined by the <title> tag.
So which one should you use as a dimension in your GA reports?
Page Path
Pro: Each page on your site will only show up once*
Con: Depending on the format of your URL slugs, it may not be easy to tell which page you’re analyzing.
e.g. A page path (URL slug) of /best-baltimore-burgers-13248239/ indicates that this page probably talks about the best burgers in Baltimore.
But what about /louisville-clappers-ringers-mcdonalds-petes-thelma-may-delicious/? This does not as clearly indicate that the page is a list of the best burgers in Louisville. (A made-up example, of course.)
And since, for some reason, GA4 doesn’t currently allow you to click or copy URLs, it’s not as if you can quickly navigate to the page in question to see what it’s about. You would have to manually type the URL from the report into your browser, which, no thanks.
*That’s if you use “Page path and screen class.” If you use “Page path + query string,” however, every unique query will create a separate row in your report, even if they point to the same page.
i.e. 1 vs. 2 and 4 vs. 5 in the following screenshot.
Page Title
Pro: Unless you have some weird page titles, it should be pretty easy to tell which pages you’re analyzing in a report.
Con: Every time someone’s browser is set to translate your website, that will create a unique, translated page title in your reports.
And I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t tell you which page on my site rows 4 and 5 are (below) if my life depended on it. In this case, page path would be more useful.
That brings us back to the original question: Should you use page titles or page paths in your Google Analytics 4 reports?
It depends.
If you want a clean report where it’s easy to tell to which page each row is referring, I recommend “page title.”
But if you tend to see a lot of translated page titles and you want to make sure all data from each unique page is consolidated into a single row, I would go with page path. And if your URL slugs aren’t easy to interpret, it might be time to rethink your URL strategy.
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: Our Little Secret About the GA4 page_view Event
When you set up your Google Analytics 4 account, there are seven enhanced measurement events. So long as you don’t deactivate them, Google will automatically collect this data from the moment your data stream is live.
At the top of that list of enhanced measurement events is “Page views.” Or as it appears in your GA4 dashboard, page_view.
If you want a no-fuss, out-of-the-box setup, you’re good to go.
But if you’re like me, you’ll want to supercharge your page_view event to make sure it’s capturing custom data such as author, section, parameter-less page paths and more.
At the same time, you’ll want to make sure those parameters don’t fire on irrelevant pages.
Today, I’m going to show you how to do just that.
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