Segment that captures page creation date

[zd42055501]

I’ve tried Googling for an answer to the following question, but cannot for the life of me find an answer. I will ask the same question in 3 ways, hoping that at least 1 of 3 makes sense to one of you.

1. I want to create a segment of visits of pages that were created during a certain timespan, namely this week.

2. I want to create a segment of visits of pages that existed this week but did not exist last week.

3. I want to create a segment of visits of pages that were published this week.

In case 1-3 are not possible, then I’d like to find the next best thing. For example:

4. A segment of the very first visit(s) of a page.

Thanks in advance!

[nickh86417692 · Accepted solution]

So unfortunately, segments in Analytics are always based on a specific users activity, rather than the activities of a specific page. So while you can build a segment that will show the first time each specific visitor has visited a specific page, you won't be able to build a segment that shows the first time specific pages have been seen (or created/published).

You could, however, create a daily data source upload that would include date, pagename (standard dimension), page created (custom event), page published (custom event). Then for any arbitrary timeframe, you could pull a page report and then filter by page created or page published. Then you know those pages were either created of published during that timeframe, and you could easily throw in the visits metric to see visits for those pages that were created during that timeframe.

[Pablo_Childe]

If you are working in lets say a blog environment then the key here is to actually ensure each content piece has a creation date variable you can scrape from the page.

Then it just becomes a new variable you can correlate or filter against. Like Nick mentions above this could be a new variable or event..(i personally would lean towards variable). then no SAINT manual uploading is needed. Your Points 1 and 2 with some segments could be built. Point 3 seems similar to point 1(Unless you specify creation date, and publish date separately.)

Also check it can help you with identifying point 4.

Visit Number

[zd42055501]

Thanks for your response.

In this case it's a forum environment. Goal is to automatically track the performance of, let's say, forum topics that were created in the last week, seven days, last month etc.

We're scraping the creation date from the page, but it's scraped as text and not as a timestamp. This makes it impossible to create a segment that looks at a timeframe dynamically. I hope I'm explaining this clearly

Not sure if @nickhomer's solution would fix this, I'd have to look into daily data source uploads.

[Pablo_Childe]

Perhaps then implementing a solution for custom timestamps will then work...

Instead of just capturing it as a text file format the output at same time as following example.

timestamp

regards

[Gigazelle]

I'm afraid that this capability isn't directly available in Analytics. Nick's workaround might be a viable solution.

In the meantime, I'd recommend upvoting this idea: Dimension Segments