Tracking Sessions to folders in Content Drilldown for Google Analytics

We are using GA for our site which has a few thousand pages. I have been asked to find out the most popular content on our site which sounds easy until I get deeper into it.

We have a number of different databases connected to the site for information. One lists business' listed in our Business Directory, another lists cemetery records for people buried开发者_StackOverflow中文版 in our cemeteries. Another is property data. Each of these databases contain thousands of records.

If you were doing some family research, you may sit down and use the cemetery search and look up a number of different names, search records, etc. In one session, you may view 100 records, but you are just one person. In your session, you may not visit the business directory or look up any property data.

Another visitor may visit and in their session, search for a business and find the information and close their session. If we have 10 other people do the same thing and search for business' and then leave, that would mean that the Business Directory is more popular than the Cemetery database because 11 people (visitors/sessions) have used it where only one person has used the Cemetery.

Obviously this is a very simple example because there are other pages on the site that are just content. You click on the link, see the content, maybe click on another link etc...

If I do a Content Drilldown report it will show that the cemetery folder is massively popular because the session viewed 100 pages. This is misleading because it was just one person.

So..... How can I do content reports on my existing data based on visitor and not so much of pageview? Ideally by folder because most of our content is broken up into it's own folder.

It sounds easy but I can't seem to find any info on it.

Thanks!

If all you have is the basic global coding, it's not impossible to get what you're looking for, but you're gonna have to do some manual work...but one thing you can do is create a custom report and for instance use

Dimension:

Dimensions > Content > Page

Metrics:

Metrics > Site Usage > Unique Visitors

Metrics > Site Usage > Visits

So here comes the manual labor... the Page dimension is not like the Content drill-down Page dimension. It does not create drill-down-able hierarchies of your sections, based on the URL. So for this report, it shows each unique URL on the top level.

From there, you can add a filter for each site section..I'm assuming since the content drill-down report works for you, that your sections look something like this on a top level...

yoursite.com/cemeteries/...
yoursite.com/business/...
yoursite.com/family/...

So in the custom report, you would filter for "/cemeteries/" and then get the totals, then change filter to "/business/" get the totals, wash rinse and repeat for all your sections.

Actually, if you know your way around excel, it would probably be easier as an alternative to take the custom report and export it to excel and then split up the page column into individual columns by the "/" and then filter/group/sum/whatever from there.

Overall, ideally what you can do to make it easier and keep things within GA is to make use of custom coding. You can populate custom variables or trigger events (or both) on your pages, passing things like site sections, or events like when a user goes to a section of your site, and do your slicing and dicing with them, in the custom reports. To a degree, it is even possible to achieve that "drilldown" effect from the out-of-the-box content-drilldown report.