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I would like to use Google Analytic's visitor flow to understand the behaviour of my visitors.

My current visitor flow looks like this:

Visitor flow

As you can see, my URL structure is not really friendly to this tool, and thus I'm having a hard time extracting any useful information from there.

I've seen that analytics.js allows us to send custom variables, including overriding the path.

I guess that I could override the path to give all pages of the same type a common (fake) path, something like:

/restaurant/123/index => /restaurant
/restaurant/456/index => /restaurant

/restaurant/123/order => /order
/restaurant/456/order => /order

but I would be losing the potentially precious information that the original path represents.

Is it possible to send a custom variable to Google Analytics instead, and have the visitor flow use the custom variable instead of the path when displaying the above flow?

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  • I'd have to look into it further, but you might be able to use two separate pageview functions if you want to do as you're saying and categorize them into a lump, but also preserve the original for granularity.
    – Ally
    Jan 13, 2014 at 20:01

1 Answer 1

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Hopefully in the future this will be achievable with the recently launched page group feature, but right now I think you'll have to make a hack.

If preserving the original URL is important, I would recommend setting up a new view and then using filters to rewrite/aggregate the URLs.

AFAIK, you can't use custom dimensions in filters (yet), so you would have to set up a an advanced filter for each "type" of URL you want to rewrite.

For example:

Filter type:           Advanced
Field A:               Request URI
Field A pattern:       ^/restaurant/\d+/index
Output To:             Request URI
Output To value:       /restaurant
Field A required:      Yes
Override Output Field: Yes

Now all pageviews to /restaurant/xxxxx/index will be aggregated under /restaurant in your new view, but still be reported with the proper URL in the old one.

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