Google Analytics Question

[M_Lyons10]

Hi everyone. I have been using Google Analytics for our site and I do like it a lot. However, in the last couple of weeks I have noticed traffic being directed to pages that have never existed (I have a customer 404 that shows). I really cannot for the life of me figure out where the traffic is coming from. So I was wondering if anyone knew a way that I could zero in on analytics for a specific page like this. It's never a lot of hits, but far more than should occur for a page that has never existed or been linked to... I went through the website and cannot find any link to this odd page either. Additionally, with no update to the site, this week the bizarro page has changed... Last week it was "userq2.html", this week it's "userq17.html"...

I looked at the Visitor Flow in Google Analytics, but since these pages get so little traffic, they are always in the "more" category and as a result the information displayed is much more limited and doesn't show where the hit came from. Some of these pages are the first page people are coming to and a couple are hits from another page. I've double checked the html and the css and there is no link to this page on any of my pages...

Does anyone know how I can drill down and see analytics for a specific page in Google Analytics? I've never seen the option anywhere, so I didn't know if I was just missing it entirely.

Thanks Again,

-Matt-

[threetonesun]

Site Content > Content > All Pages > View full report (down at the bottom) should give you ever page on the site that has gotten a hit. If you click on the page, you can change the metrics to view whatever you want.

Are you using a CMS of some sort? It sounds like someone is looking around for something, although it would make more sense if it was user?=2.php

[M_Lyons10]

Thank you very much. That was very helpful. It shows that the one page is getting views after a user views another page on the site, but I just double checked for the 100th time, and there are no links to that site... I ran the page click analytics in a separate window as well and there are no clicks on the site that aren't accountable for... Just this one...

And that still leaves the puzzling question too of the people that have that be the first page they hit on the site... And particularly odd that this would be all of a sudden. Like I said, it's not a large number of page views (Maybe 6 - 8 over the last couple of weeks), but it's bizarre, which is why it's bothering me...

I don't use a CMS either, just Dreamweaver and Filezilla to get the pages and resources up there. It's a simple html site.

I'm intrigued about the potential that it's someone looking around for something. That would be really odd... I wonder if that's what it is... I mean, a link to this page has never existed, nor has a page ever sat at that destination... I'm assuming the only reason I even see the hits is because of the analytics on the custom 404...

I've even done some searches to see if the search engines are returning results for this page, but no luck there either...

I've never experienced something like this. One one hand, I'm worried that a customer might be getting directed to this page for whatever reason from somewhere... But on the other I'm at a complete loss as to from where or how that would occur... So, the best I can come up with is that someone is actually typing this into the URL bar for some strange reason...? And another strange bit is that this page was viewed between two news stories with very long descriptive URL's... So I really can't imagine someone going to one of these news stories, then typing in this bizarro page, then typing in the URL to the news story correctly.... I don't think *I* could do that... LOL

[threetonesun]

Anything weird in sitemap.xml or robots.txt? If it's in between two unrelated urls, it's probably something just searching through your site.

[M_Lyons10]

Anything weird in sitemap.xml or robots.txt? If it's in between two unrelated urls, it's probably something just searching through your site.

Hm... Thanks for the tip. I'll check that out and report back. Thanks so much for your help.

[pritesh123]

Also check for any hidden links in your HTML or PHP file. Some of the developers are notoriously known for doing that.