URL Structure for Study Guides
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I'm creating study guides for various musicals, plays and operas. A few issues:
- I want to easily view in Google Analytics data for all study guides, data at the category level (musical,play, opera) and data for an individual show.
- I want urls to be as short as possible for usability purposes.
- Some show titles are the same for shows in different categories. For example, there is the play Romeo and Juliet but there is also an opera Romeo and Juliet.
- Each study guide contains multiple sections that will live on different URLs (overview, context, plot summary, characters)
What would be the ideal URL structure? Here's what I was currently thinking we should use:
/show/play/romeo-juliet/
/show/play/romeo-juliet/context
/show/play/romeo-juliet/plot
/show/play/romeo-juliet/characters
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Thanks! I think we'll go ahead and remove /shows from the URL structure and use Advanced Segments in Analytics.
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Absolutely, what you would do is create an advanced segment in Google Analytics which includes all of the show types. That will give the same info.
There is even an alternative if you want to have this in the old way in Google Analytics, you would overwrite the usual pageview and create a custom one. For example on this page: /play/romeo-juliet the normal pageview would be: ga('send', 'pageview'); if you would change it to: ga('send', 'pageview', '/show/play/romeo-juliet'); it would still record the view in the old way. As I said, I don't like creating custom pageviews for this purpose.
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If I don't use the /shows subdomain, is there still a good way to see in Google Analytics how much traffic is going to the study guides in general, regardless of show type?
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Hi Jason,
Why not do it shorter and use: /play/romeo-juliet and /opera/romeo-juliet so you would drop the /show/ part out of the URL? Then /play/ or /plays/ would be an overview of all plays. Besides that I think you did a great job for the URL structure. You've checked if these are the keyword most people look for: content, plot, characters, right?
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