I'm trying to find in Google Analytics how to determine the number of sessions where a user visited more than one page within a section. For example:
User visits the following pages:
/
/section-one/page-a/
/section-one/page-b/
/section-two/
This user session would count as more than one page in /section-one/.
User visits the following pages:
/
/section-one/page-a/
/section-two/
This user session would not count as more than one page in /section-one/.
How is this done in Google Analytics? Preferably without adding custom events.
Jay, I think that your best solution is to build a segment in order to properly know how many sessions did see a given number of pages within a section.
This solution will work with a page that has a path structure that allows it, as described in your example: /section-name/page.
So, the way to achieve this is to create a Segment using a "Sequence" of conditions.
The sequence will make the segment match the conditions using the following logic: if session viewed page within /section/ and later viewed another page within /section/ that user saw at least two pages in that section.
So the sequence will be:
- Include Sessions with Page contains /section-name/ is followed by
- Include Sessions with Page contains /section-name/
Add as many times as the threshold you want to track.
The only flaw I see is that if the user saw two times the same page, it will be counted as matching the condition. I can't figure a flawless rule yet to overcome that issue. I have tried some, but I cannot say they are a definite solution. Anyways, as long as I can see, this kind of segment does a good job, even if there will always be some error margin.
Maybe someone else knows a more elegant way to do this.