Measuring site performance may seem overwhelming if you’ve never done it before. Google Analytics (GA) is a great, free tool for measuring site speed amongst other metrics/data. Setup is as simple as adding some JavaScript to your webpage. Application Insights from Microsoft is another free option you can try but today we will look at GA.
Out of the box, you will get lots of great information about your users, popular pages and performance. Further configuration may be necessary to make the data more useful however. In my case, my URLs are all unique but I want to see my page speeds for pages grouped by topic. Another common scenario is pages with IDs in the URL which make the URL unique for a common page. In both cases, we can easily configure GA to group the pages for reporting purposes.
Open the Content Grouping page from the Administration menu.
Create a new grouping and name it.
There are several options for grouping your content such as by tracking code or regex extraction. In most cases, a Rule Definition will allow you to group the target pages using one of the supported logic filters.
You can add multiple definitions to define your separate groups.
Here I have defined groups by topic using the Page field (this is the path after the root domain) and the contains filter.
Once the content grouping is defined and saved you can select it on various reports in GA. The content group is not retroactive however. You will have to wait for the grouping to be populated with future data. Additionally, reports will continue to see non-grouped results if your report date range includes dates before the grouping was defined.
Happy Measuring!!
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