How can I get a view of previous pages to the previous page?

[AnnaWo]

I'm looking to see the journey to a page that is signposted on the Home page, however I want to know if people are landing on the homepage and then click to the next help page, or are they browsing on the website but can't find what they look for hence they navigate to home page and then the help page.

[igupta]

Hi @AnnaWo ,

I can think of few ways to get this report.

1. Use Page flow report. You can use the page that you want to track the journey to as the End page and examine the common paths that users take to reach that page.

2. If you are sure of the paths, you can try using a sequential segment. Something like -

• Visit container ( page = home page THEN (within 1 page view) page = help page)

Let me know if this helps or if you need more info!

Thanks,

Isha

[AnnaWo]

Thanks very much, that's super helpful!

I tried to build a segment but did I do it right? Shouldn't be that many visits.

This is the segment info: 

Thanks again!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Hi, That segment is returning all Visits that hit the home page, then any time in the visit hit your contact us page... not necessarily direct from home page to contact us.

The first think you should do is use the "Next or Previous Item" panel:

This will build a report showing you all the Previous Pages... and you can look at how those segments was built, and you can use that as a template to build a specific path...

Here is the generic segment that was built:

If you need to look for Home Page specifically, you should be able to change some of the generic containers looking for any page, to look specifically for the Home Page...

Or have I missed some of the details of what you are trying to find?

[MandyGeorge]

The way you have your segment built is that they have one hit on the first page then at any point in the visit after that, they see the second page. If you want it to be directly from one page to the next, then you need to add qualifiers to the "then".

Beside "then" click the clock icon. Set it to "within" and "1 page view". That means that within 1 page of seeing the first page, they have to see the second page. That will limit it to what you want and should significantly lower the visit count.

[AnnaWo]

Thanks guys, this is really helpful! I have amended the segment to add "within 1 visit" however I'm not sure about the outcome. The outcome below shows that majority came from homepage (to homepage? what?) or contact us page. Does this look right to you?

and here is my segment:

Thanks!

[igupta]

One thing - Can you please use Page Views as the metric along with Page dimension (and not previous page) as I think you need exact page views of the page from home page.

Also, if you have previous page dimension set up, you can just look up page views of at "contact-us" page with hit level segment with condition previous page equals home page.

[AnnaWo]

Apologies, I'm not sure I understand (I'm just a novice), is this what you mean? 

The numbers seems huge here.

If this isn't what you had in mind could you perhaps show me with a screenshot? 

Thanks so much for your help

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Ok, can you help us understand exactly what you are trying to pull? Are you trying to get the page views of "Contact Us" that came directly from the "Home Page"?

As in, maybe there were 100 PVs of "Contact Us", but 30 came directly from the Home Page, so you want to see "30"??

Example:

Visit 1:

• Home Page
• Contact Us Page
• Page A

Visit 2:

• Home Page
• Page B
• Contact Us Page

Visit 3:

• Page C
• Home Page
• Contact Us Page
• Page D
• Home Page
• Contact Us Page
• Home Page
• Page A
• Contact Us Page

Visit 4:

• Page E
• Home Page

Visit 5

• Contact Us Page

Visit 6:

• Page F
• Contact Us

What are you trying to get here?

Which scenarios are you trying to pull data back for... and are you trying to get the PVs of the "Contact Us Page" that fall into the scenario, or are you trying to get the count of Visits that contain the scenario (note that Visit 3 has multiple scenarios, but at a visit level, it would count once regardless of how many times the scenario exists)