Tracking pages with variables in GA

Question

Recently I have updated my site, it now passes a variable on some links like so... www.mysite.com/1234/?play=true

I've noticed in Google Analytics it records www.mysite.com/1234/ and www.mysite.com/1234/?play=true as two different URL's. Is there a way to merge them because they are after all just one page, It makes "Top Content" for example hard to read because of dupilicates.

I've read about something called canonical link tag which may help this? My blog has this already inserted into the head but it doesnt make a difference.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

In your google analytics code you can pass the canonical URL

See this https://stackoverflow.com/a/9108454

Answer 2

Google Analytics doesn't use canonical urls by default.

From Google Analytics perspective those are two different pages. If that parement doesn't affect the page at all and you want to ignore it for reporting purposes than you have to tell Google Analytics to ignore that parameter.

The best solution for you here is to ignore the query parameters that don't change the page at all. You can do that in the Profile Settings Screen.

Click on Admin > Profile Settings

Then on the Exclude Query Parameters text box just type: play

Note that it will only work from now on. The previous dates will still have that parameter because Google Analytics data can't be changed after processed.

Reference: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1010249