Confirmation page gets hit multiple times by some users. How I can I segment out unique visits?

[eVenuesSEO]

Hi All,

I'm web marketing manager at http://www.evenues.com which is like an AirBnB for meeting space. When calculating the number of bookings for our meeting spaces, I've set up a goal in analytics with the confirmation page as the goal URL. The problem is, it seems that some users are looking at the same confirmation page several times. We have unique URLs for each confirmation page, but some users seem to be visiting these unique pages more than 2 to 5 times. This skews our numbers a bit.

This makes things a bit problematic when it comes to segmenting visitors. is there anything we can so that each unique URL visited only counts once?

Thanks,

Kenji

[MikeTek]

Hi Kenji,

I'm not sure if you're still experiencing this problem or have found a workaround at this point...

I'm wondering if you c an figure out how people are getting back to that conversion page for their subsequent visits. Are they simply bookmarking the page, or is it linked to a confirmation email/similar?

What I'm thinking you could do is set a variable in your confirmation URL, just a means of varying the URL slightly for that first time you push the user to the final step.

So instead of:

http://www.example.com/thankyou.html

You'd use:

http://www.example.com/thankyou.html?var=true

(The "var=true" can be anything - it won't effect the page load.)

Changing your Goal URL setting to Exact match, you could require this variable.

So when you push your users to the final step (the true conversion), you send them to the URL including the variable.

Then, from all other places the user might be able to navigate back to the confirmation page (emails, etc), the variable is not included in that version of the URL. And to ensure they aren't just bookmarking the page and coming back later, you can use HTML 5's pushState() to change the address bar and remove the variable after Google Analytics tracks the pageview.

Hope this helps. I think taking a closer look at how you can customize the confirmation page URL for the first time the user hits it is where you'll find your answer.

Best of Luck,
Mike

[KevinBudzynski]

Can you do a head match for the goal and do a custom report segmenting new visitors?