Seeing Page URLs and Page Titles in the same report is like the gift that keeps on giving. Not only can you easily track 404 error pages in Google Analytics without having to change the tracking code on your site, but it also makes it very easy to optimize your Title Tags. The Title Tag is probably the most important on-page SEO element, so it’s in your control to change it.
Pull up your Top Content report and use John’s tip and insert the parameter &segkey=request_uri|page_title into the URL of your browser. The report should look similar to this one, with Page Title in the secondary dimension dropdown:
Next, we can use the Advanced Filter in powerful ways:
1) Find missing Title Tags
Look for Page Titles containing “not set“:
2) Find short Title Tags
A Google search result will display about 70 characters of the Title Tag. You can use a regular expression (regex) in the Advanced Filter to find title tags based on number of characters. If your title tag is very short you are wasting a valuable opportunity to describe your page better.
Here is a Regex you can use:
^.{0,69}$
This will return results that are fewer than 70 characters. An example of fewer than 30 would be:
^.{0,30}$
3) Find Title tags that are too long
Conversely, you may want to shorten title tags that are too long. Here is the regex:
^.{70,}$
This means more than 70 characters. If you have more than seventy characters in your title, it will be truncated in the Google search results.
Of course you’ll want to prioritize what pages to fix, but these three filters should give you plenty of ideas to write better title tags.
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Nice post but you can do most of this in Google Webmaster tools
Another way to find short page titles I have been SEO custom Crawl – then creating a column with with =len(cell ) …
Then using Highlighting rules to show the long ones and the short ones!
Thanks for the tip Sam. Yeah, I don’t think it’s a hard problem to get title tags in different ways, but coming from a web analytics perspective I like the fact that I can get the info in there now. Plus I can now segment against keywords and rank according to value to help me prioritize.
Great idea Gerry! I basically approached this post from the perspective of “look, you can do this in analytics” because I didn’t quite know how to before. I spend most of my time in analytics, so that’s my tool of choice.
I agree with you Michael, is good to know that you can do it with Analytics too, I used to work with Web Master Tools.
Thx
Does this parameter no longer work? I have tried placing it different areas of the URL thinking maybe it wasn’t just the end…but it never ads the second dimension.
Very useful post. Note that the new GA doesn’t let you see page and page title side by side in the standard reports, but you can still get to it by creating a custom report.
Hi Ana,
I believe you can still see Page and PageTitle side by side in the new GA but you have to update the URL itself. Try this: Go to the Pages report and select any 2nd dimension, eg browser. Once you see Pages and browser in the report, look for “browser” in the URL and substitute by pageTitle.