By default Google Analytics doesn’t provide a page path report. You can see the entrance and second step (Behavior – Site Content – Landing Pages – Entrance Paths) and in the last 3 steps before a conversion (Conversions – Goals – Reverse Goal Path). But if you’re running an ecommerce store, often the last 3 steps are part of your shopping cart and they’re pretty much the same for all conversions.

Understanding what pages customers are viewing and in what sequence could give us valuable insights, so let’s try to get this data using Google Sheets. I explained how to add Google Analytics add-on to Google Sheets back in December.

What we’d like to do now is built a custom report with more than 2 dimensions that are sorted in a particular way.

1. Start a new Sheet document and select Add-ons – Google Analytics – Create new report.

2. Select your GA Account, Property and View ID and the following metrics and dimensions:
Metrics: ga:pageviews,ga:entrances
Dimensions: ga:pagePath,ga:date,ga:hour,ga:minute

3. Hit Create report and add the following for Sort and Segment:
Sort: ga:date,ga:hour,ga:minute
Segment: sessions::condition::ga:transactions>0

Note: If you don’t have ecommerce tracking, you can use a segment sessions::condition::ga:goalXCompletions>0 where X is the number of your goal

4. Update your time range (Start Date and End Date) and Max Results.

You may also want to expand the Max Results to 10000. So your final configuration will look like this:

It will take only the sessions with transactions and show you the pages in these sessions, sorted by date, hour and minute, so basically it shows the path of each customer. The Entrances will show you which is the landing page for each session.

5. Run your report: Add-ons – Google Analytics – Run report.

Analyzing the data in this scenario will be possible with up to 200-250 conversions for the time range you selected. If you have more conversions, you may wish to add another dimension like City, or implement custom dimension for GA Client ID so multiple sessions happening at the same time are not mixed up.

This custom report is pulling hit-level data, so next week we’ll see how to combine it with session-level data like Transaction ID, Source / Medium and Revenue.

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.

Margarita Evtimova

Margarita Evtimova is a Google Analytics fan, who also loves SEO, conversion optimization, online marketing and social media. You can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.