Google Analytics Brainstorming - Using unique course/page URLs to track page traffic from different sources

  • 16 March 2022
  • 5 replies
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pmo
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  • pmo
  • Docebian
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Recently I discovered a unique element to how our course URLs and page URLs work within the platform. I’m not a Google Analytics wiz but this definitely has me thinking that there might be something useful for identifying traffic from different sources. I’m curious what all the beautiful brains in the Docebo Community think about this and whether it’s useful or not. 

 

Let’s look at the homepage URL in Docebo University: 

 

https://university.docebo.com/pages/113/homepage

 

The “page slug” is in bold and is what the system is really using to route a user to a certain page. 


/Pages[indicates the function within the lms]/113[Page number]/homepage[Page title]



What I discovered is that if you change the page tittle of the URL, without actually changing the page title within the UI of the LMS, the link will still direct to the original page AND the result will appear in google analytics. 

 

 

So for instance here’s a link to the homepage with a different page title

 

https://university.docebo.com/pages/113/CM-1-Homepage
 

My thinking in the above is that this could be useful if you have a permanent link to a page on a site outside the LMS. The URL would get logged and you would know that “CM-1” is connected to that page where you’ve hosted the URL. 

 

:question::question::question::question:What do you think? :question::question::question::question:

 

 

Is there something useful in the way these page urls can be customized that might add benefit to tracking?  
 

My thought is that this could be a workaround for how certain parameters are stripped out of the URL when a user logs in. 

Anyway, I’d love your thoughts and can’t wait to hear what you have to say. 

 

 

5 replies

KMallette
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@pmo Do you think an approach like this could help GA NOT track some pages?  We have an EE platform, and one of our tenants has FUOU content (requires security clearances to view) and so we can’t have GA looking at any of those links. This has meant that none of our tenants can use GA since GA is only configured globally instead of by tenant (which is really should be).

KMallette/Viasat, Inc.
pmo
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@KMallette That’s an interesting idea but I’m not sure I have much input on it. You still have to add the google analytics code into the platform and so it would still log all that traffic. Were you thinking of anything specifically here that might help? 

Bfarkas
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Yeah @KMallette , even if you told GA to ignore certain directories/pages its code still runs, collects the data and then ignores so I doubt that would be allowed in the secure setup you describe.

pmo
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@mark Would this be helpful to you at all? I recall you mentioning having difficulty with campaigns in GA in this thread.

 

@alekwo Do you have any thoughts about this idea? I’m trying to figure out if it’s a nothingburger or if there’s some meat here. My only concern is that it might water down some of your data but I’m not a GA wiz so I kind of wonder if there’s a workaround for that. 

M
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My issue with GA was that it simply didn’t work with Docebo unless the user was already in an active session and clicked a GA link. In my use case, we were inserting GA tagged course URLs into a newsletter email sent by our Marketing department via a 3rd party (Pardot). To my surprise, Pardot kept the GA tagged links we provided intact. But when a typical learner clicks on one from within the newsletter, they are usually not in an active (i.e., authenticated) session in Docebo unless they just happened to have been logged in very recently. 

The result: they are redirected by Docebo to the sign in page, and along the way the Docebo app strips out the GA tags. 

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