How do we use Navigation Dimensions?

[Andrés Flores - WATT]

Hi,

There are 2 new dimensions that deal with navigation.


ga:nextPagePath A page on your website that was visited after another
page on your website.

ga:previousPagePath A page on your website that was visited before
another page on your website.

Anyone knows how to use them?

Hod do you set the context? Next or Prevous page to or from which
page?

Cheers,

Andres

[chrissky]

query ga:pagePath and ga:nextPagePath and create a matrix with
ga:pageviews in cells. This gives you a great visual map of how
visitors are navigating.

Chris H.
www.shufflepoint.com

[Andrés Flores - WATT]

Hi Chris,

Works! I tried uniquepageviews and it also works? Do you think it's
actually returning visits in which at least one time I had that
transition?

cheers,

Andrés

[chrissky]

I do think so. I haven't had a chance to really dig into it, but I
wonder/hope if we really have data for two transitions:

previousPagePath -> pagePath -> nextPagePath

Please share any additional insights you gain!

Thanks,

Chris Harrington
www.shufflepoint.com

[Nick]

Hi There,

Using ga:previousPage and ga:nextPagePath in the same query will
report back, "The total times pageview A happened immediately before
pageview B in a visitor's session" If you are familiar with the User
Interface, this data is used to present the Navigation Summary
report.

Say you have the following data from the query above

A -> B
B -> C

The Navigation Summary will report:
A -> B -> C
(of course this is not a 3 step path, but if you see the report in the
UI it will make sense)

-Nick

[andres]

Hi Nick,

I tried out a query with dimensions ga:pagePath,ga:nextPagePath and
metric ga:uniquePageviews

It returns values (and actually make sense when compared to
ga:pageviews for the same dimensions).

Is it a valid combination?

Is this query returning visits in which each transition pair
pagePath>nextPagePath was followed at least 1 time?

This is something we can not get from GA GUI and I really like it.
Could you please confirm.

Cheers,

Andres

[Nick]

Hey Andres,

You should not use ga:pagePath with ga:nextPagePath

While it works in some situations, but the system was not designed
with these combinations in mind so in some cases there could be weird
data showing up.

-Nick

[Andrés Flores - WATT]

Thanks Nick,

I've using it like you posted and it works great.


I have 2 new questions.

1) When using dimensions ga:previousPagePath and ga:nextPagePath is it
ok to apply filters?

For exampl:

ga:country==spain over a dimension to get the navigation for visits
from Spain

or

ga:goalCompletionsAll>0 over a metric to get navigation for all visits
that completed a goal

2) I get a lot of pageviews for a line that read other to others...
what is the meaning of this line?


thanks,

Andres

> > > TheNavigationSummary will report:

[Brock]

Nick, I wanted to chime in and ask a follow up question. If you
recommend that we do not use pagePath and nextPagePath, what is the
best way to expose the data for page B, such that we know the previous
page (Page A), and the next page, (Page C)?

Thanks for all of your help on this group!

- Brock

[Nick]

Similar to my answer above.

To get A -> B -> C similar to the Navigation Summary report in GA, you
need to use two queries.

1: to get the previousPagePath for all pages where nextPagePath == B
2: to get the nextPagePath for all pages where previousPagePath == B

Hope that helps,
-Nick

[Brock]

Thanks Nick. Makes sense.

Regards,

Brock

[Nick]

But don't let that discourage you.

Do share with the group the cool and exciting stuff you're developing
with the API :)

-Nick