Engage-Digital

If you use or are thinking of using a tag based analytics tool pay close attention to your page naming convention. Get this wrong and you’re toast. Get it right and life will be sweet.

The page naming convention is the piece of the jigsaw that allows you to find and identify content groups and pages in your analytics GUI. Some tools like Google Analytics don’t make use of page naming conventions, they just use the page URLs and / or possibly page titles. Others like WebSideStory’s HBX have specific variables in the tag that need to be filled.

The page naming convention allows the user to split areas of a site into content groups and identify pages uniquely within those content groups. It might be easier to think of it as a kind of Russian Doll. You have the site as the main content group, within that you may have a number of other content groups representing your main areas and within each of those main areas you may have another sub-level(s) of content and so on. Establishing unique content groups and page is important when creating funnels and segments which are crucial to doing in depth analysis.

It’s wise to create a naming convention before adding the tags. Within WebSideStory’s HBX the content group names and the page names are represented in two main variable within the javascript tag, these are identified as PN=… and MLC=…

JS tags for other tools use similarly identifiable variables.

Stuff to bear in mind before creating a decent page naming convention:
1. Before anything else, always think about the (business) objectives for the site and what questions your analytics tool will need to answer . Gather together the key stakeholders and ask them what their requirements are. It’s a nightmare to go through all the trouble of setting up an analytics tool only to find you can’t answers questions from a key stakeholder.

2. Do you want a “horizontal” or “vertical” naming convention?
“Horizontal” naming conventions generally identify pages by type right the way across the site i.e. Category, sub-category, product pages etc.

“Vertical” naming conventions identify pages by section i.e. ‘News>UK>article title’, ‘Sport>football>article title’.
Generally speaking media sites like online news providers tend to use vertical page naming conventions while sites selling stuff tend to use horizontal page naming conventions.

3. Don’t use illegal characters. These may be things like “()-*&? etc. They may also vary from tool to tool. Always check with the analytics provider first. To be absolutely safe stick to upper and lower case letters and “/” to separate content groups.
There are other issues with tag based tools around ensuring that you are tracking links properly, streaming video if you use it, internal search etc but these are technical issues that should be covered off as part of the essential house keeping of tagging.
If you use a tag based system that doesn’t make use of page naming conventions consider how you can improve things by using search engine friendly page URLs. There are two good reasons to make the effort here:
1. It will help categorise pages in the analytics tool user interfac
2. It will help with your SEO
Example: (you can click on the image to enlarge it)

If you are looking at setting up SEO friendly URLs you can still consider them in the context of horizontal of vertical although they will work better for SEO if they are based on a vertical solution. The trade off is a business decision you will have to take.

The objective of this post has simply been to point out that the level of ease and therefore the depth of insight you get from your analytics tool can be much enhanced if you take the time at the outset to establish a decent road map in you naming convention. I have saved myself a lot of agro in past doing this. Any thoughts or comments most welcome.