The Art of Page Naming

Although it’s true that “it’s the little things that make life fun”, when it comes to analytics, the little things can make web traffic reporting more like a nightmare. 

This is true when dealing with page naming a site.  If done correctly, they present a detailed picture of your site’s health and your visitor’s behavior.  On the other hand, if care is not taken when creating a page name, the reports look sloppy and in some instances, you could be inflating page views by grouping traffic from multiple pages into one report.        

It’s true that there are ways to automatically create a page name on your site’s page, but it may not produce the right information or the information that it’s presenting won’t make sense.  When I explain to clients the importance of creating a unique page name, I pose this argument:  What if you’re a new Marketing Manager and your boss asks you to create a traffic report of a site that you’ve never seen.  “Easy” you might think.  “I just log into my favorite analytics tool and download the page na……hmmm.”  I forgot to mention that what you find as page name are things like index.htm, q=123, http://www.site.com among other names that really makes no sense.  As a bonus, there’s no documentation detailing what each code, or page is.  You could either go through each URL to try to figure out what each page is about, or try to “wing it.”  In the end, the report won’t look professional and might create more questions than provide answers. 

In order to create a report that is both clear and concise and avoid any confusion, follow these simple steps:

1.       Before doing any modifications, look at your current reports and identify pages where the information presented is not the best.  This could be because of length, using query variables to identify a page, displaying a URL, among others. 

2.       Once you have a layout of all pages and domains, create a naming convention that can be used across all sites.  This is very important because if you’re looking at pages from different domain, you want to make sure that you understand the path that a visitor is taking.

3.       Remember that the page name is the lowest form of content.  Page Names should contain a brief description of where you are with relations to the site and what information is on the page.  If you’re looking at SEO information, for example, the best practice for implementation is [site name]:SEO.  This is very important if you have multiple domains that contain similar information.  You can have page names such as Domain1:SEO, Domain2:SEO, etc.  Not only this tells you the location but also provides you with feedback if the visitor goes from one domain to another in your site.

4.       Have someone else look at your work.  Even though a strategy makes sense to you, it doesn’t mean that it make sense for everybody in the organization.  By having a coworker review your page naming strategy, not only you can verify that the information that each page will produce is the right one but that is easily understood.

5.       Test, test, and when you’re done…TEST AGAIN!!!  There is nothing worse than a good plan that is badly implemented.  The best way to test data is by having a separate account for this purpose.  You can send traffic there for a determined period of time (I tend to test an implementation from 2 weeks to a month).  The reason behind this is to keep test data from being mixed with “live” data.  Plus, in the event that something is done wrong, it can be changed without any repercussions.  Once you’re happy with the reports that are being generated, switch the test account to the live account and SUCCESS!!

Although creating a proper page naming convention might look like a time consuming task and be more of an art form than a chore, at the end of the day, hard work is rewarded in quality.  And that my friends, is time well spent.