Google analytics not showing nice names or category names

denisegoldberg · December 1, 2011

This post is an offshoot of a discussion in the thread URL Preview/Google Analytics. The OP was asking how to identify the galleries shown in Google Analytics. JFriend posted a screen shot of what he sees in statcounter (which includes the full URL, with category & nicename), and I posted a screen shot of what I see in Google Analytics - which is the old-style URL, /gallery/id_key - the same format that the OP was seeing.

Google Analytics is not reflecting the URL shown in the address bar. I can't see anything on my site that would be causing the use of the old-style URL in analytics.

Can someone check this out? Where is Google Analytics getting the URLs from?

--- Denise

jfriend · December 1, 2011

I can confirm by looking at Smugmug's support for Google Analytics in their javascript that they are calling a function called SM.util.normalizeURL() that takes a pretty URL with nicename and converts it to an ugly URL with only gallery number and sends that to GA.

The issue you report Denise is being caused by Smugmug's code to handle GA. They use the same code for their own page tracking as for customer's page tracking. My guess is that they want normalized URLs by gallery number for their tracking and they didn't think to leave regular pretty URLs for customers. A couple lines of additional code to NOT change the URL if it's a customer's GA account instead of their own could fix this.

scotticus · December 2, 2011

I'm sure there were other reasons for doing it like this, but one of the problems with using nicenames for tracking is that any edit of the category or gallery name would reset the stats in GA. By breaking it down by ID the stats for the galleries won't change when you edit the names.

Twoofy · December 2, 2011

Yeah, if we change the URLs anytime a nicename is changed the GA will see it as a whole new URL and all the historical data will be lost. To be honest, I would be perfectly content to argue the "right thing to do" on either side of this one....

- Greg

scotticus · December 2, 2011

Also, GA doesn't report hash tags, so all image level reporting would be lost on our ajax styles.

jfriend · December 2, 2011

scotticus wrote: »

I'm sure there were other reasons for doing it like this, but one of the problems with using nicenames for tracking is that any edit of the category or gallery name would reset the stats in GA. By breaking it down by ID the stats for the galleries won't change when you edit the names.

Do you realize that viewing statistics by gallery number in the reporting tool is pretty worthless. I use StatCounter and have never had any troubles with it using nicenames. I rarely change gallery or category names and if I do, it's no big deal to me that historical data doesn't come along. I'm mostly looking at recent data to see where the action is. It's a much bigger deal to me that the URLs mean something to me in the reports.

Keep in mind, this is our OWN reporting tool, not SM hit reporting. We ought to be able to make our own reporting tool work the way we want. If we want actual URL names, we ought to be allowed to have them. Of course, one can always avoid the Smugmug manipulation of the URLs by using something other than GA (StatCounter is supported by Smugmug, but without URL manipulation).

denisegoldberg · December 2, 2011

I agree with John - if I change the nicename and lose some stats, that's not a problem. Usually the only time I change a nicename is when I first create the gallery and decide to fine tune.

Google Analytics by gallery number is not very helpful. Yes, I can click on the pop-out to see which gallery the numbers belong to - but that means that I essentially lose the power of looking at a report to see a set of galleries.

Can you make supplying the nicename to Google Analytics an option?

--- Denise

denisegoldberg · December 7, 2011

Bump for response from smug.
Any chance for a change in this behavior? Using nice names is a much more user-friendly option.

--- Denise

Andy · December 7, 2011

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Bump for response from smug.
Any chance for a change in this behavior? Using nice names is a much more user-friendly option.

--- Denise

No decision has been made, sorry.

Google analytics not showing nice names or category names

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