Howto

Here's a bit of Javascript you can use on your website's 404 page so that when you look at your stats in Google Analytics, all the missing pages that your visitors tried to visit are grouped into one place. This technique can be useful as it gives you a single place to look in your stats for any bad URLs that people visit often, perhaps as the result of a mistyped link, or a deleted page. read more »

If you use Google Analytics to track traffic on your websites, then you've probably run across the annoyance of seeing mysterious hits to pages that don't exist on your website. Common examples I've seen are like:

/cache.aspx?q=09823...
/search?q=cache:F093...
/translate_c?hl=de&sl=en...

These hits are the result of other websites that pull in the content (and tracking code) of your site, such as translation services and Google's caching system. The hits can be useful data that you don't want to throw away, but perhaps you don't like the way they clutter your All Navigation and Content Drilldown views.

My solution to dealing with this clutter is modify all recorded hits from domains other than my own and group them into an imaginary folder (I call mine "otherdomains") in my stats. Essentially, every hit from another domain that shows up in the stats will be recorded in the form: /otherdomains/requesturl, where requesturl is the actual URL that caused the hit (e.g. www.google.com/search?q=...). read more »