Comments on: Using Page Level Google Analytics Custom Variables to report on SEO traffic by page type

By: Sam Critchley

Sam Critchley — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:10:55 +0000

I found this article and the comments really useful, thanks. I ran into problems getting Google Analytics to recognise my custom variables though. It turns out that the setCustomVar _gaq.push commands you have in your analytics snippet need to be placed BEFORE your trackPageview command or else they won’t be picked up. You can debug this with the Google Analytics Debugger extension in Chrome (and possibly in other browsers).

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 07:51:55 +0000

This is such a usefull guide, thank you! I’ll try it right now – thanks again.

By: penny jones

penny jones — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:20:45 +0000

This is a really informative post. I never knew this was possible. I’ll give it a try, thanks for sharing this with us.

By: Maskinauktioner

Maskinauktioner — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 13:27:05 +0000

I will try that on my site…

Thanks :-)

By: Julian

Julian — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:52:39 +0000

This is extremely useful. We have been using this technique at our website to track the pages under categories (what you call here “section”). By using this custom variable in Google Analytic you can learn more about your data. Thanks for sharing.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:43:07 +0000

Id agree. this is a good way to pin point where traffic comes from in LARGE sites. Some of our sites number well over 1000 pages and some in the e-commerce fields have over 10, 000 products.

Thanks Patrick

By: Dev Basu

Dev Basu — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:19:24 +0000

Neat post Patrick. The CustomVar has so many applications and isn’t used as widely enough as it should be!

By: Nathen Less

Nathen Less — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 21:30:16 +0000

One option is to use a second tracking script, to create a separate roll up reporting profile within the parent account. This has the advantage of not using valuable custom variable slots that you may want to use elsewhere and it allows you to populate the _trackPageview() call with whatever value you want. Examples could include aCategoryPage, aSubCategoryPage, aProductPage and so on.

By: piehole

piehole — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:15:16 +0000

Custom reports are really the way to go if you want to crack web analytics. We are following Avinash Kaushik and this type of reports are really wort setting up.

@Patrick – agree with your point, it’s much better if you can, to have custom urls with one keyword. When you have categories there, you might end up looking like a spammer – eg http://www.voiceoverartists.com/voiceovers/voiceovers-uk

By: Gennady Lager

Gennady Lager — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:36:29 +0000

I see. I guess this isnt a universal issue as it certainly doesnt affect all category and product-based sites meaning it isnt bad in all cases. Cheers.