Setting the default page for your website is a simple configuration step that insures the quality of your Google Analytics report data is good. The default page for a website is the page shown to a visitor when they enter just the website domain into the browser’s location bar. If you type http://www.cutroni.com/ into your browser my webserver returns index.php. You won’t see index.php in the browser’s location bar, but that’s the page the server returns. This is the same for directories within your website. http://www.cutroni.com/blog also returns index.php.
Why does this matter to GA? When the urchin.js tracking code executes it creates pageviews using the page name that the visitor requested. What if there is no page name, as is the case above? GA creates a pageview for /. When people type http://www.cutroni.com/index.php GA create a pageview for index.php. See how this can cause a problem? GA collects pageviews for / and for index.php. Two pageviews for the same page.
Pageviews for a page should be summarized in a single line item, not two! Note: I know the above example isn’t all that great. It would be better if 50% of the traffic was for / and 50% was for index.php. But I don’t have any profiles with bad data :)
To remedy this problem enter the default page for your website in the ‘Default page:’ field in the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ configuration section.
Be sure to only enter the page name, no ‘/’ before the page name and no regular expressions. Just the name of the page, nothing else.
Remember, this change will not affect data that has already been processed by Google Analytics. It will only affect data that will be processed in the future.
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Thanks for the great tip! I have read all your blog posts and you are VERY helpful!
I made this change in my Google Analytics profile. My question is now for all the date ranges BEFORE i made this change I am getting visitor information for BOTH the root / AND /index.php.
AFTER I made this change when you look at the visitor information the top content just has /index.php.
How would I join the data for “/” and “/index.php” for the previous dates before I made this change in my profile?
Thanks!!
Hey Rob,
Unfortunately you can not change your historical data. Changes that you make to a profile configuration only affect the data going forward.
Thanks for the comment!
Justin
Hey there, great article-good read.
I’m curious though, have you ever had the issue where GA wasn’t returning “great” data for the index page? See, I’m having an issue similar (or the same) as this one. My stats are showing very small pageviews for my homepage. Everything is set up correctly in my settings, but the numbers are still in the 10-15 range, while every other page is in the 1000′s. Ideas?
Also, you can actually see an entry for “/”. I don’t…and searching for “/” is difficult as it picks up pretty much every other page…
Anyway, if you have any suggestions or ideas I’d love to hear them…
Have a good one,
Mike
k…I think I got it (for what it’s worth)…I missed the “/” at the end of the Website URL entry
Hi Mike,
I’m gald you figured it out and glad you you enjoyed the post.
Thanks for reading!
Justin
Hey Justin,
Thanks for the tip – the default page setting works fine on my site but do you know of any solution to GA tracking separate entries for url’s that are entered with different capitalization?
ie – http://www.mySite.com/thisFolder/ is tracked separately than http://www.mySite.com/thisfolder/
Thanks,
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
The solution for mixed case URLs is to use a lowercase filter on the profile. You can read more about this solution in my post on Makeing GA data quality suck less.
Thanks for the question,
Justin
Hi Justin
That’s been killing me. Thanks for solving at least half of my problem with Google Analytics, which otherwise is just great.
Ben