Creating a Filter in GA to track Parent Category

[RishadShaikh59]

I don't know if the title makes sense, but here's my question...

Our newspaper website has multiple categories like World, Sport, Entertainment etc. Now, a story, belonging to the entertainment section maybe published on the entertainment page but is likely to have a slot somewhere on the Home page as well as other pages. The same goes for stories in sport etc. However, the url displays the date folllowed by the post title and thats it, no category name.

Now, a user may end up going to a detailed story that belongs to the entertainment section (from the home page or any other page) without actually having visited the entertainment page. However, for tracking purposes, we want to see how many hits we got on the entertainment page and any story belonging to that particular section. So, my question is how do I go about creating filters that can help me track category page and detail story hits as one? Or, should I ammend the url structure (keep in mind we are using wordpress for our news website) to include category after the date and would this solve my problem of tracking?

I asked a similar question recently but maybe I did not explain myself clearly.

Thanks!

[RishadShaikh59]

Your answer raises many more questions!

[Julich]

Hi Rishad,

CustomVars are your best friend for this : http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html

Right before calling trackPageView, set a custom variable (with a page-level scope, which is the level #3) to store the category of the story :

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
    1,                   // This is the slot number. Read the doc for this, since you only have 5 slots available.
    'Category',     // This is the name of your custom variable.
    'Sports',         // This is the value of your custom variable.
    3                    // This is the scope. Use the page-level scope for your use case. Read the doc to fully understand this.
]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

You will then be able to create a report using this new custom variable to count the number of visitors and pageviews per category.

Hope this helps,

J.