Under-appreciated feature: The “URL Viewed In Visit” filter
(Applies to: Custom Reports)
This filter allows you to look at visits that contained a certain page … anywhere in the visit.
Other visit filters depend on the first page of a visit. This one looks at the whole visit. It’s wonderful. A bit of a breakthrough in analytics, really. WebTrends just slid it in a few versions ago without much fanfare, but it created a big buzz among those who noticed it.
No special coding of pages is involved, no fancy WT.* parameters. It’s all done through the Custom Report UI.
You can filter visits that:
- contained a purchase
- contained a purchase larger than a certain amount of money
- contained On-Site Search
- contained an on-site search for a specific word
- got as deep as the product detail page level
- looked at a particular product
- included a download
- downloaded a specific download file
- saw an application but didn’t fill it out
- never saw the home page at all
And so on.
You can apply these filters to any custom report, which means you can look at just about anything other than path analysis (which only happens at the profile level).
Create one in the Custom Reports Filter area. Make a Visit filter. In the “Filter On” dropdown list, find it near the bottom of the Visit Dimensions list: “URL Viewed in Visit.”
2 comments
This is a very cool feature. Has anyone come up with interesting applications of it in terms of reporting, and harvesting value from it. I can picture a bunch that would use pathing, but as you say in the piece — this isn’t possible. I’m still new to thinking in the dimensions of custom reports so any thoughts would be great!
You can probably get something almost as good as pathing, just by using this a filter with the dimension of “Page.” So, if you filter for people who used on-site search, did they have fewer product pages in their visit? Did they tend to have “contact us” in their visit more than people who didn’t use on-site search?
Or entry pages. We on-site searchers predominantly people who didn’t enter at the main page? Or the opposite?
Of course, you have to have an interpretation of what it means if they used on-site search. A lot of people think it’s a sign of confusion, so they would be a little worried if entering at an interior page meant people resorted to search. They’d maybe want to change the navigation available on those internal pages to be as good as what’s on the home page.
Or if on-site searchers tended to have a high proportion of a particular product type, they might wonder if that product type is hard to find using just the navigation.
Or you could use this filter for one of your KPI pages. Isolate people who signed up for something, and see if their entry pages were different, or their referrers. Or the keywords they used to get to the site or the keywords they used to search on once they’re there. Or did the people who signed up include a particularly cool site feature more than those who didn’t sign up? Maybe that’s an indicator of the persuasiveness of that cool feature.
I create a lot of these filters for KPI events or anti-KPI events (indicators of a negative experience). For each of these filters, I make one custom report that uses the filter as an Include, and another identical report that uses it as an Exclude. Then, using Excel, I compare.
The most common dimensions I use are Pages, Content Groups, Referrers, Search Phrases. Or custom dimensions based on a parameter that’s unique to the site, like ProductCategoryID or maybe Region.
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