ga:PageTitle not matching ga:landingPagePath

[Bill Edwards]

Hi,
I'm getting pagetitle and pagepath combinations in my result sets that
do not exist.

I'm using the data export api to retrieve metrics on what search
keywords are driving organic traffic to my webpages.

My query is structured as follows:
Dimensions:
ga:hostname,ga:landingPagePath,ga:pageTitle,ga:keyword,ga:source
Filters: ga:medium==organic;ga:source==google
Metrics: ga:pageviews,ga:uniquePageviews
Sort: -ga:pageviews

In one of my queries I get the following results in the same result
set:
Result 1
ga:landingPagePath - /category/1
ga:pageTitle - Actual Title of Page

Result 2
ga:landingPagePath - /category/1
ga:pageTitle - Page Title that does not match with the URL

Does anyone know what might be going on?

[James Standen]

Hi Bill,

I just put a similar query through and I get strange results as well, lots of landingPagePath/ Title pairs that make no sense.

Looks like I'm seeing the same thing you are in the API.

[Bill Edwards]

Hi,

After thinking about this more, I think the problem may be that the
pageTitle is showing the title of the pagePath and not the
landingPagePath.

Afaik, landingPagePath is showing the page that users entered from the
search engine. However, pagePath refers to any page that the user
viewed in the session after entering the site from the search engine.

I think that even though we're not specifying pagePath as a dimension,
pageTitle is referring to the pagePath.

If this is the case, then it poses the question - how can we find out
the pagetitle of the landingPagePath?

Can anyone confirm or deny this?

[James Standen]

I think we were both thinking the same thing at once-  yes, the pageTitle is the page path, and the query has multiple rows because it is not one row per entry, its a row per page the viewer viewed in the session.  What you describe makes perfect sense to me- and I've run a few queries here and it looks like this would work:

It seems to me that to get the landing page title what you need to do is do two queries and join them together.

First Query-   landingpagePath, PageTitle and Entrances as the metric-  this will only have a row for each landing page (in theory- I've done this with my data, and the one interesting thing is that my home page had three pageTitles in that First Query (the actual title, "Home" and "Index")

Second query - your original query but without PageTitle

Join these two together using landingpagePath, and you'll have the landing page title in there.

Having more than one title in that first query for a given as having three rows will cause duplicates when you join.  You'd have to clean up that dataset to avoid that.

[chris@shufflepoint]

It probably makes sense to submit a feature request for landingPageTitle dimension

[Nick]

Hi,

So here's how it works.

ga:landingPage returns the page path of the first page hit in a session.

ga:pagePath returns the page path of all page hits in a session.

ga:pageTitle returns the page title of all page hits in a session.

ga:pageviews returns the number of page hits for each of the matched combinations of dimensions and filters

ga:entrance returns the number of page hits that were the first in the session.

So querying landing page and page title returns, all the titles of the pages that belong to all pages in sessions that started with that landing page. Since a session can have any number of paths, this is probably not what you want.

Adding a filter of entrances > 0, should only return the langding page and title where the hit was the first in the session. So the title and landing page should better align.

Also you should keep in mind that page title and page path do not always have a 1 to 1 relationship.

-Nick

[Nate S.]

If all you're looking for is the number of pageviews of specific entry
pages by page title, just run your initial query and replace
ga:pageviews with ga:entrances. Doesn't that accomplish your end?

Nate