Keep Calm and Name the Page properly - Sitecatalyst Pages report

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Page Naming is the most fundamental requirement of Implementing Analytics on your Website. Yet, time and again I discern a casual approach towards it.

Now, human nature is more risk averse than reward motivated. So, let me tell you what you are losing first with a casual page naming.

In Sitecatalyst/Report and Analytics, several reports like your pathing reports, your clickmap reports are essentially based on your Page names. So, if you screw up your Page Naming you miss a lot on your other goodies.Plus, Pages report is very very special. It is an out of box s.prop(traffic variable) with special powers. You can drill down all other reports based on pages report. Thus, it is one of those reports which will be kind of ubiquitous in your Analytics reporting and thus it gets extremely important for the organization to do the page naming exercise with devotion.

Page Naming is not retroactive. Let me elaborate - Suppose you casually named your pages, then one fine day someone in your organization is struck by lightening and the fellow declares - dude! we need to have clean page naming. Very well dude! But, the problem in Sitecatalyst will consider the modified/updated names as entirely new pages! So, you will not get historical data combined with the fresh data for a page whose name has been modified. Instead, you will get data in two separate rows as two separate pages.

If you don't give your webpage a name for Analytics, Sitecaalyst will automatically fetch the URL as the page name. Now, few screw ups here -

• http://www.SanmeetIsSoAwesome.com and http://www.SanmeetIsSoAwesome.com/# are essentially the same page, but to Sitecatalyst they are entirely separate pages!

• If your page is Dynamic using some swanky Rich Internet Applications, then all the pages will be clubbed as one because the content of the page changes but the URL remains the same. So, all pages will be reported as one!

• How good are you with reading URLs and separating one from the other in a table full of 50 URLs? I am pathetic at it. Please give me names

• In Sitecatalyst tables, the rows have a limited space to display Data. You are wasting precious real estate with http://www.......yada yada

• ClickMap uses the s.pageName variable to identify ClickMap pages. If the implementation changes on a page where s.pageName is a different value, ClickMap does not show historical data. Thus, you end up getting partial data for links on a page.

• The partial data issue is equally applicable to your pathing reports also. Pathing reports - Next page, Next page flow, previous page, previous page flow et al, in all these reports you select the page name as the criteria, not the URL.

I hope, you now understand the importance of page naming. If you are scared that "freak! but, my page naming is screwed." then dude, you should be!

Now, I will present some points from the implementation side, some strategies to implement the page naming variable and some cheats to clean your page naming implementation, yeah yeah don't be scared.

*popping fingers*

So, Now from implementation point of view Pages report is populated by s.pageName variable which has a query string parameter as pageName or gn in the Adobe Analytics image request. As i mentioned above it is a traffic variable and thus has a character limitation of 100 bytes, this means input beyond 100 charachers to this variable will be truncated.

Now, various ways through which you can feed value to this variable -

• Server side -

Better suited for Dynamic pages

• Hard code -

Suitable when you have very less number of pages and you are dealing with a team which is Analyticsally challenged. So its like -dude, don't do anything else, don't touch anywhere, just place this code on your webpage and tell me once done, again don't touch anywhere. Dynamic pages are difficult to hard code, totally avoid it. 

• Page Name plugin -

This plugin needs some configuration and it uses the structure of the URL to populate page names. Use this plugin only when you have a clean URL structure. 
I will make an entry on this plugin in some other blog.

• document.title

This one is pretty straight forward. It uses the the value in the <title> tag of your HTML page and uses that as the page name. It is one of the most common approaches to automate the process of page naming. The only drawback which i have witnessed is at times multiple pages have the same title though their context is different. And what you gonna do bro when a page does not have a <title> tag?

• Outsource your page naming to an Indian company. eClerx does a very good job with it. We will look at each and every page of your website and give it a clean name with valid context. Hint - there is something called processing rules *bling bling*

Now, some strategies to have page names. The three Cs of Awesome page naming -

1. Conciseness - Keep it short
2. Clarity - Keep it easy to understand
3. Context - Ensure that the end user is understanding the right thing

Now, the small s - Structure! why structure?

The page Naming is still not that simple. It very much depends on the structure of your website and how vast and deep is your website. if it is a biggie then just one s.pageName will not be sufficient. You have to use other variables that are giving the detailed description of the webpage.

If you have a proper structure in your s.pageName, then you can use the this structure to feed values to other variables as well. like s.channel variable which is used to populate the site sections report.

A few examples -

Now, lets take a hypothetical website - http://SanmeetIsSoCool.com (born narcissist) , now i sell super hero collectibles. I sell comics, costumes, merchandise, videos and hope :)

Now, lets take a webpage where I am selling Batman's Poster where Bruce Wayne meets Bruce Wayne. So, what should be the ideal page name?

Merchandise | Batman | Poster | Bruce meets Bruce

Now, this is concise, it is easily understood and conveys the right information and it is structured.

I can use this same variable, perform a channelextract and populate other variable like my s.channel for site sections reports. What are the advantages of using same variable to populate others? Automation bro!

Now, some cheats-

1. How to find pages with no page name?

Simple, go to your pages report. In the filter box type http . This will give you the list of pages with no page name. Again this thing won't work if you are using the page name plugin. That's why i said that use page name plugin only when you have clean URL structures

2. How to find Mutiple URLs populating same page name?

One, you go to pages report. Drill them down with the report which is being used to capture page URLs. Here if you can discern that different URLs are having same page name then you get your answer. Now, again this thing is not advisable for massive websites

Two, outsource it to an Indian company. eClerx does a very good job with that :) We will audit each and every page of your site and then report the pages where different contexts are sharing same page name.

3. How to fix page names without altering the site?

Processing rules bro! Use the condition when URL matches something.com overwrite s.pagename to some page

Now, again as i said the data is not retroactive and it will be a birth of a new page in your analytics reports. So, what you can do is use new variables - one prop and one eVar to store the new page name and henceforth refer to them, and maintain record of what has been replaced for any historical comparisons.


I hope you found what you were looking for and I was able to convey my message properly. Please feel free to reply back to me your thoughts. I sincerely welcome any suggestions, critique.

If you want to contribute any more information, you are most welcome. Please share it if you feel this is worth sharing.

Till then, stay thirsty, stay awesome and spread positivity