Product list optimization project, part 1.3. GA tuning: Pagetype dimension

This post is a little diversion from the main course of this project.

Earlier I’ve been working on another UX research project which goal was to discover behavioral patterns in users’ sessions, in order to improve information architecture of the website. My approach was to apply hierarchical clustering to a number of sessions. But it’s hard to find any patterns when you parametrize session via URLs of each page in this session. Simply, it’s too much of diversity.

So I came up with idea to make a new dimension, Pagetype. Roughly speaking, it’s a place (coordinate) of this page in the website’s information architecture. It looks like this:

“<Senior section of the website> <level X> <particular type of the page>”

For example, “catalog level 4 product list”, “catalog level 5 product page”, “news level 2”, etc.

Performing some magic on distance measure and using Ward's minimum variance method while clustering, it gives very interesting outcomes for the information architecture analysis.

But let’s get back to our project!

I’ve mentioned Pagetype dimension because it helped here in this product list project too. Website I’ve been working on has product lists on different levels of catalog, from 2 to 5. So I used Pagetype custom dimension to filter product list pages from pages of other types.

This website happened to have a little bit weird CMS, and only javascript after page is loaded can decide whether it is a product list or not. So I’ve made a dedicated “Window loaded” tag in Google Tag Manager to track the Pagetype custom dimension.

I recommend to have such custom dimension if you work with behavioral patterns.