Making sense of Page Views in GA4

Since everyone and their uncle is now jumping on the Google Analytics 4 bandwagon, what you’ll see is a lot of basic implementations of GA4.

And that is not at all bad. With a simple base tag and automatic measurements in place, you’ll get a lot. Engagement, scroll events, file downloads.

And of course, the good old page_view. I want to feature this core event in this post, to make your life a bit easier.

What is collected in a default page_view?

Well.. not a lot, really.

The “page_location” is sent – which is the URL, including the https bit, and all url parameters, and a “page_referrer” – which is also in URL form.

What is not mentioned in the documentation above is that there is also a “page_title” that gets sent.

And that Page Title is very prominent in the reports. It’s the default.

And.. not without a reason, because the only other thing is the page_location, which is.. very unreadable.

A bit more readable is the “Page path” dimension in the GA4 interface. This is basically the page_location with the protocol and hostname stripped, but not the query parameters – those are still there.

Exclude Query Parameters: nope

GA4 currently has no option to exclude query parameters in the configuration section, like Universal Analytics had, in the view level.

This means that all pages with fbclid , msclkid and even gclid will be there in your reports, making your precious page paths unique.

Not nice.

This means you will have to work around it during collection time.

Workaround

In the base tag of GA4, you can send a field that I like to call “clean_path“, and fill that with the GTM built-in variable {{Page Path}}.

In that way, you have your lovely clean Page Paths available in GA4.

Make sure to add this parameter to your GA4 custom dimensions, too, so it will be available in the reports and in Data Studio.

Content Grouping

Pretty recently (as everything in GA4) this little drop-down item popped up:

With no indication of Content Grouping in the documentation, I was left wondering..

Can this field be populated? Will there be 5 groupings? Or just one?

After some experimenting, you can indeed use it via the content_group parameter.

Unfortunately, the content_group2 parameter does not work for now.

And as always with GA4:

To be continued..

I will keep updating this post if there’s changes to this event. Thanks for reading!

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