How does the completions metric work with pages in GA?
September 22, 2013 4:30 PM Subscribe
I was working up some custom reports in Google Analytics, and dropped some goal completion metrics into a report with the "Page Title" dimension. My first thought was "well, that shouldn't work" because ... well because I'm not sure why, but something to do with most pages not being part of a defined goal.
All the same, some completion numbers came back on pages that are most definitely not in the conditions for goal completions. They make sense in rough proportion for reasons that are a little busy to get into but amount to "Yeah, I can absolutely see how that page would figure prominently as an assist for completion of that goal."
My first thought was that those pages must be somewhere in the visitor or visit history for the goal completions they've got completion metrics for, so I went to conversion reports to see if I could come up with corresponding numbers. The closest I could get was a somewhat close match between the "Last-click or Direct Conversion" numbers and what I was seeing in my custom report. The assisted conversion numbers ran roughly double what I was seeing in my custom report.
I get the feeling the numbers are probably close to meaningless, and as near as I can understand a few things I've looked up, it's entirely possible to mix and match visit and page metrics in a way that return nonsense data. Is that the case here? Or is there some value in pairing the completions metric with page titles to get a sense of how much a page may have contributed to completions? If so, what does that number represent?
All the same, some completion numbers came back on pages that are most definitely not in the conditions for goal completions. They make sense in rough proportion for reasons that are a little busy to get into but amount to "Yeah, I can absolutely see how that page would figure prominently as an assist for completion of that goal."
My first thought was that those pages must be somewhere in the visitor or visit history for the goal completions they've got completion metrics for, so I went to conversion reports to see if I could come up with corresponding numbers. The closest I could get was a somewhat close match between the "Last-click or Direct Conversion" numbers and what I was seeing in my custom report. The assisted conversion numbers ran roughly double what I was seeing in my custom report.
I get the feeling the numbers are probably close to meaningless, and as near as I can understand a few things I've looked up, it's entirely possible to mix and match visit and page metrics in a way that return nonsense data. Is that the case here? Or is there some value in pairing the completions metric with page titles to get a sense of how much a page may have contributed to completions? If so, what does that number represent?
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