Determining whether a visitor reached two different pages in one visit
- by Shaun
I have a funnel that I would like to track. Tracking this funnel won't work with the default "goal funnel" tracking in Google due to the fact that I am mixing events and pageviews. As such, I've created a series of reports:
Visits to demo pages - An inclusion filter on "Page".
Triggers an Event on these pages - An inclusion filter on "Page" and "Event Category".
Does not bounce - An inclusion filter on "Page" and an exclusion filter on "Exit Page" for these same pages.
Reach our storefront - ??
Purchase something - An inclusion filter on "Page" and a report that shows "Transactions".
At a basic level, I need to track users who reached demo pages, then reached any page on our store.
Intuitively, I created a segment, used two inclusive "Page" filters (one for the demo pages and one for any page in our store), and combined them with an "AND" operator. I thought this was working until I tried to do the same thing in a dashboard widget and on a custom report. When I tried the same thing in those areas, I got zero results.
I figured this might be because widgets and custom report filters function differently from segment filters (the options are different for all of them), so I tried applying my "demo page && store page" segment to a report that gave me a general page list. All I saw was a list of the specific pages.
I tried simplifying things by creating a custom report that showed all visits to store pages, then applied a segment that filtered for users who visited demo pages. This got me the same numbers as my "demo page && store page" segment, but showed a list of demo pages.
This has led me to believe that the "demo page && store page segment" approach and the "demo segment && store report" functionally behave the same. However, this experience has left me questioning whether they're giving me what I want.
Are these methods showing me all users who reached both sets of pages? Is there a better/easier/more standard way of doing this aside from looking at visitor flow reports?
I'm trying to avoid a combination of custom variables/events and using the horizontal funnel approach since it would consume a large number of our limited goals and seems more complicated than is necessary for tracking this funnel.
