Interpreting your GA4 reports #15: Pages and URLs

Your website is made of pages/URLs so you will typically want to view your traffic data by what page your events are occuring on. GA4 has quite a few dimensions for classifying your pages/URLs some of which can get confusing. Below is a list of the main ones with an explanation.

We’ll imagine for the sake of these that the user has hit the URL https://www.mysite.com/contact-us?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Brand and that this is what we’re reporting on.

Hostname: This is the domain name (including subdomains) that the user was on, with www dropped. For the example URL the value would be mysite.com. If you have multiple subdomains, it’s a good idea to view website performance by hostname. This dimension will also flag cases when your website is being accessed outside of your domain. For example, if people are using Google Translate to translate one of your pages, it will be accessed through translate.goog so this is what will show in your report.
Page location: This is the full URL including the https and all URL parameters so in our case it would be https://www.mysite.com/contact-us?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Brand. This gives you the full picture but may be too granular. For example, most ad platforms append a unique click ID to each ad click so for this dimension, every ad click will be on its own row. Also note that it will include any UTM tags you’ve included.
Page path and screen class: This is just the URL folder(s) that the user was on, so the hostname and URL parameters are dropped. In our case, it would show as /contact-us. This can give you a good summary or what pages people were on.
Page path + query string: This is the full URL but with the hostname dropped. Everything else will be there so in our case we’ll see /contact-us?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Brand.
Page title: This is the page title that showed in the user’s browser and would normally match the SEO/meta title you have set your page. If your URLs are not very meaningful but your titles are, this may be your preferred dimension. However, note that if the user has used their browser to translate the page, it will translate the title as well and that’s what will show up on your reports. So unlike URL dimensions, title reports may be incomplete as there may be rows in other languages further down in the report.
Landing page: This is the page that started the user’s session on your website. It will not change throughout the user’s session, so you can have the landing page for an event be different to the current page. This can give more information about what type of user you’re reporting on. For example the exit rate on your checkout page might be very different for sessions that landed on the homepage vs a product page.
Landing page + query string: This is the same as the above but including URL parameters so any UTM tags, click IDs etc will get carried over.
Content group: If your website has hundreds or thousands of pages, you will probably want to group the pages into more meaningful and custom buckets. This is similar to a custom channel grouping (see the previous post in the sequence) but for the content on your website. You can set these by passing the value of the content group to GA4 from the user’s browser, see more here.