OUT OF DATE: These instructions were originally provided for Universal Analytics. This version of Google Analytics is no longer available.

Content Groupings also exist in Google Analytics 4 but cannot be controlled in the admin section. You need access to the actual tracking code, which we do not have with Etsy. This ability might be added later as Google continues work on GA4 functionality!


It’s a fact of shop-ownership-life that some listings do better than others. Sometimes your best pieces fly off the shelves; other times people seem to love that one listing with a terrible photo (so you think). And of course there are items you’re super proud of that get no traction.

So you want to find out why. You want to see how long people stay on particular listings, where they go to next, whether certain traffic sources send more interested visitors than others.

Those are questions for Google Analytics to answer, but if you head over to your All Pages report, you’ll find something frustrating. You can’t just compare a list of all your products.


⚠️ IMPORTANT!
These instructions are for GA Universal Analytics and are no longer applicable. Etsy now supports GA4.

The out-of-date article below is available to read if interested. If the topic is still relevant in GA4, it might be updated in the future.

Google Analytics treats each unique URL as a separate Page. But with Etsy using parameters so liberally (like our beloved “REF”) it means that each listing is inevitably viewed via many different unique URLs. Add in the fact that visitors from outside America have their country code at the start of every URL (eg. /au/shop/etc. or /au/listing/etc.) and it can be very tricky to review a simple list of products.

I have fewer than 50 products in my store and hundreds of pages in Google Analytics.

Over 700 pages show up in Google Analytics

If I want to analyse one particular listing, I can just do a search for that name (eg. moss-green-crochet-button-earrings) and they’ll all show up. But what if I want to compare two items? What if I want to find my best or worst performing items?

Enter Content Groupings.

Group all pages for each product, automatically

Content Groupings are a feature of Google Analytics that let you automatically put each page into groups. They can be a little confusing, so here are the basics:

  1. Each View can have a maximum of five Content Groupings.
  2. One Content Grouping contains multiple Groups.
  3. One Group contains multiple pages.
  4. One page can only be in one Group for each Content Grouping. So in total, it can be in five Groups — one per Content Grouping.

We’re going to create one Content Grouping (called “Product Pages”) which will automatically create a new Group for every product. These Groups will each contain all the unique URLs for that product.

It’ll look like this:

Screenshot example of product page groups.

Change your listing titles often? Include your listing ID.

My Group names are simple, like naturally-striped-snail-shell-brooch. But if you experiment with your listing titles often, your Group names will change often, too.

If this is you, you can include the listing ID in each Group, so you can identify different Groups that refer to the same listing. (You could just use the listing ID as the Group name, but then you wouldn’t know what the listing was for, at a glance.) These Groups will look like 207693723/naturally-striped-snail-shell-brooch

I’m going to show you the pattern to use for both including and not including your listing IDs in your Group names.

Set up Your Product Pages Content Grouping

Head over to Admin > Test View > Content Grouping > + New Content Grouping

Name it “Product Pages“.

Next we have to set up the rules for what pages should go into what Groups. Rather than manually list each product in here, we’re going to automatically “extract” it from the page URLs. Once this rule is set, you won’t have to change it as you add more listings!

google-analytics_how-to_content-grouping_add-extraction

Under GROUP USING EXTRACTION, click “Add extraction”.

In the Extraction Details, leave the option “Page” selected and enter one of the following patterns into the text field.

To INCLUDE your listing IDs

^.*\/listing\/([0-9]*\/[a-z0-9-]*).*$

To NOT INCLUDE your listing IDs (simple Group names)

^.*\/listing\/.*\/([a-z0-9-]*).*$

Click “Done” and “Save” to complete the whole Content Grouping.

How to use Content Groupings in your reports

As always, pages will only start to go into your Content Grouping from the time you set this up. So you won’t be able to analyse past visits using them.

You can use Content Groupings most places where you view lists of pages. The best place to start is by going to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and change the “Primary Dimension” of the report to your “Product Pages” Content Grouping.

google-analytics_how-to_change-primary-dimension-to-product-pages-content-grouping

This report will now list individual products instead of unique page URLs.

From here, you can:

  • Click on any Group name to see all the specific page URLs for that listing.
  • Add “Source/Medium” as a secondary dimension to see how traffic source affects listing performance.
  • Use the Navigation Summary tool (above the line graph) with pages grouped by “Product Pages” – see how visitors navigate from listing to listing.

How will this help you analyse your listings? Let me know below! Any questions? Ask away!

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