Analysing pages by Title Reports instead of URL Reports

The Page Titles report differentiates between pages based on the content between the <title></title> tags within your HTML. This is typically a short text description of what is shown on the page and is often automatically generated by your content management system. There are a few reasons why you may want to use the Page Titles report instead of the standard Pages report.

Whereas Pages differentiates between pages by URL, for example, https://example.com/products/ and https://example.com/products/2/ would be two unique pages. In the case of Page Titles, both of those pages may share a duplicate title of “Products” as they both show a paginated list of products on your site. When analysing your pageviews, you might be more interested in how often pages on the /products/ path were loaded instead of how many visit each numbered page e.g. /products/2/ and so on.

Another example of where this might be useful is, if you offer functionality to automatically translate the content of a specific page on the same URL (or when visitors use the “Translate this page” feature within their browser). In this case, reviewing the Page Titles report instead of the Pages report will give you an indication that the page was consumed in an alternative language.

Alternatively, it can be useful if you use a content management system that doesn’t generate human-friendly URLs. For example, you can make a good guess at what would be shown on a page with the URL https://example.com/products-homeoffice/ however, if the exact same page were loaded with the URL https://example.com/983475983536/ then even with the same content on the page, it is much harder to remember what this page is without visiting.

Because several pages can share the same page title, it isn’t possible to access the Page Overlay feature within this view. This is because there is no way to tell which specific page is being referred to.

The Page Titles section loads a report covering all of your pages by default, but is also the gateway to two other reports. If you scroll down to the bottom of the table you will see links to the two related reports: Entry page titles and Exit page titles.