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On our site we have some landing pages and some category pages with the same products on them. I want to determine which is more effective by looking at the pageviews and revenue generated for each.

Method 1 - Custom Report of Pageviews and Revenue by Page

This was my first thought. I made a custom report with Metrics of Sessions, Pageviews, Transactions, Revenue and Dimension of Page. In this report, I had 34 transactions on the landing page and 73 transactions on the category page. Oddly, there were some pages in the report that had 0 sessions but >0 pageviews, and in general the sessions numbers seemed very wrong.

Adding to the weirdness, when I include a custom segment alongside "All Sessions", the number of transactions for both pages in the "All Sessions" segment goes down to 0. Very strange.

Method 2 - Segment Out Sessions with certain page in Ecommerce Overview

Next I tried to create a segment that had a condition of "Sessions with Page = xxx" for each of my landing page and category page. This gave numbers of 24 transactions for the landing page and 44 transactions for the category page.

This seems to be the most stable data, but it's a pain to change the custom segment for each page (about 20-30 pages).

Method 3 - Multiply Page Value by Unique Pageviews

In another attempt, I tried to go to the Pages report and multiply the page value by the number of unique pageviews. I don't have any goals to influence the page value other than the revenue. These revenue numbers don't match either report.

Am I missing an easy way to do this?

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3 Answers 3

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This blog post tells you how to do it using custom reports:

  1. Create a new custom report
  2. Set the dimension to "landing page"
  3. Set the metric to your conversion goal

It sounds like you created a custom report by "page" rather than by "landing page".

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  • Yes, I did use Page because I wanted to see transactions that went through a specific page, but did not necessarily land on that page. When I change the report to "Landing Page" I get 34 LP transactions and 3 Category Page transactions.
    – Khan
    Dec 17, 2014 at 19:23
  • If you use "through a page" you can get counting inconsistencies. It would be possible for a session to use both pages before checking out.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Dec 17, 2014 at 19:25
  • True, but I'm OK with that at this point. Ideally the solution would involve being able to see traffic that went through both pages to see the overlap
    – Khan
    Dec 17, 2014 at 19:29
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I'm not sure if there is a "proper" way, but since you're using analytics, you're likely using adsense as well.

Go in google adsense and create a new ad unit and place it on the specific page you want to track. Then wait about a week or until a large chunk of traffic has gone through your site, then revisit adsense and check the performance reports tab. If you see the new unit listed, then people have visited that page and you will see what you earned as well as how many people visited the page and how many ad clicks were made to that page alone. If you really want to get deep, there are more options in adsense such as viewing what ad networks were used to place ads on that one page as well as what types of ads were used (CPC or CPM, etc).

I think adsense allows publishers to create only a maximum of 500 unique ad units regardless of the activity level of each one.

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The second method is the only correct one, according to what you describe as correct attribution. But I wonder why you'd want that value, when Page value is meant to be exactly what you are looking for. Page value will be a rough attribution of value to each page visited, and that should probably be more or less what you are looking for (determine which one performs better/worse).

If you want to have more advanced attribution, I suggest looking into enhanced ecommerce and product list. Then it's possible to figure out which one actually contributed to your sales (assuming last page/list visited is what is meant by "actually contributed").

In general, attribution is tricky, and I think the problem with your question is that (it seems) you are not sure how you want to attribute things. If you really want to attribute according to second method, stick with. You can easily create all segments and include several of the simultaneously to make it more efficient (or use an external tool which queries for the same data for you).

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