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I have a page on my site that has the following URL:

solr?filters=type%3Aphoto (let's call this URL A)

Any link to this page on my site reads:

solr?filters=type%3Aphoto

The "%3A" is a URL encoded colon (":"). However, Google Analytics correctly tracks this page URL as:

solr?filters=type:photo (let's call this URL B)

This breaks In-Page Analytics (IPA) in two important ways:

  • Issue #1: When I go to this page (URL A) inside of In-Page Analytics it says there are 0 hits (and thus no tracking of data on any link clicks on this page).

  • Issue #2: When viewing any other page in IPA it never reports any links to the page in question because IPA sees the link as URL A but all of the data is for URL B.

Fixing issue #1 is easy: I just manually go to URL B via the IPA path tool, and it correctly shows traffic on this page and all of the link click traffic.

Is there any way to fix issue #2? If I think this is a Google Analytics bug, but I couldn't find any way to contact Google Analytics support.

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Translate the URL's yourself using htaccess tools, the problem is with your site, not GA – toomanyairmiles May 10 '12 at 19:31
How is the correct encoding of URL parameters a problem with my site? – Justin May 10 '12 at 19:49
2  
This article from 2001 should point you in the right direction. GA can manage some URL parameters but not this much, it's also bad for users and bad for search engines. sitepoint.com/search-engine-friendly-urls – toomanyairmiles May 10 '12 at 20:00

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

the only think I can think to suggest would be to create a custom filter within google analytics for a search and replace and replace the correct encoding with the %3A, I would suggest creating a new profile for this, as in essence you are removing the more visibly desirable URL. It is important to note filters will not work retrospectively.

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