Pages that link to one specific page

[canada]

Hi. I just want to know how to pull a report that shows all the pages on my site that link to one specific page, in order to update the links when the URL changes. Someone told me there's a way to do it automatically, but in my experience that has never worked.

thanks, 

t

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Hi, 

Technically web analytics can only tell you what had activity, not necessarily all that exist....

There are a few ways to try and get the information you are seeking.

1. Use the Next or previous item panel

Pull your page or url or whatever dimension into the "Dimension Item", choose direction previous and select visit container

This should create a report showing you all the previous pages to the one you selected. Note, this may not mean that all of these pages link to your page...  People navigating via their browser's back / next buttons, or people using multiple tab browsing could cause some other pages to appear here, as Adobe doesn't look at referrers in this context, it only looks at the user and the timestamps of the hits.

2. Activity Map

If you are using Activity Map, you can correlate your page or URL dimension with "Activity Map Page" dimension. Activity Map collects three pieces of information when a link is clicked: Page Name, Link Value, and Region; and passed these on the next page.

So by correlating the Page to the Activity Map Page, you should be able to identify what pages linked to your current page... however, Activity Map does not have URL information, so you will have to identify by the page name alone.

3. Flow Diagram

You could also attempt to use the Flow Diagram to see what pages lead to the page you are checking. Like the first option, browser navigation options and multi-tab browsing might impact this... also, I am not sure if you will be able to get a full list (I think the lower count pages will be bucketed under other), so probably not the best option, but it exists and you can check it as an option.

Just out of curiosity, I am surprised that you would have hard coded links on your site pointing to a page that is likely to change URLs... Most websites would be driven by data, so a changed URL should update to load the correct value... and of course, any URL change should also come with a proper 301 redirect for SEO and external links to ensure that the experience isn't broken... and monitoring for the use of those 301 redirects from your operations team would be a good way to weed out links that weren't updated properly.

But I hope this helps.

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @canada 

fully agree with @Jennifer_Dungan . On top of that, it's also not hard to persist the previous page name, URL, whatever you need and put it in the payload of the next page's page view tracking call.

This way, you can always break down your data by the actual previous page's value.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Good call @bjoern__koth! while it won't be available for historical data, it would be an extra safeguard to "futureproof" your needs.

[canada]

Thanks. For the record, the links are not pointing to a page with a URL that is "likely to change," it's a section of our website that has been updated many times since it was launched in 2015, but the IA has gotten out of control so we're overhauling the section. It's a federal government website, and unfortunately, there is a separate entity who complete the publishing for us, and they no longer guarantee that the links will automatically update. Super fun.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Ahhh... got it... 

Do all the locations that point to the page come from internal pages with tracking on them? Or could there be a lot of "external" to analytics pages that link in? That could create some more complexities on this.... 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I should add, if you really want to know ALL the places, accessing your server logs would be the most complete.. but also a pretty hefty workload to go through that, particularly if you need to monitor for a longer time (daily server logs can be huge, since they record every hit for every asset)...