Custom Metrics: Page Count

[CRichwine]

Hello All,

We are a very large organization and have a lot of sites. Currently, we have a need to be able to see how many pages (approx.) are contained within a site so that we can better understand a percentage of how many pages are actually being used by visitors. We have custom dimensions where we can see all of the pages within the site, but that requires us first to drill down. This might be a long shot, but does anyone know of a way to create a custom metric that returns the number of pages that are on a site? Or possibly the number of a dimension items found within that segment or dimension? All ideas are welcome, thank you!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You can create a custom dimension using a function called "Approximate Distinct Count"

[MandyGeorge · Accepted solution]

One thing I will add to @Jennifer_Dungan's comment is that, you should also make sure to take into account if a single page can have more than one value. For example, if your site is in multiple languages (like having an english and a french version of the same page) - will those bring in different values for the same page? Also, if you are using a page identifier that is based on the URL, any query string parameters at the end will also be a unique value.

Just a couple things to keep in mind when doing the distinct count. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Good call out @MandyGeorge ... when I deal with multi-language sites, I use one page value for all variants and use what essentially becomes a "lookup prop" to indicate what language the page is presented in... but you are right that not everyone would do that. (Or maybe some people would consider language variations as "unique" pages.... )

[MandyGeorge]

My old company had english and french page names for every page. So it depends on if you want to count language variations as separate pages or not. Everywhere probably does it a little bit differently based on their needs.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Ouch.. it's so much easier to break down total traffic to a "page" down to the language used, then to try and find all the corresponding pages and add them together...  that design must have been frustrating...