How to use analytics screenviews in a website?

Question

I'd like to track screenviews in my website, is this possible or are screenviews just meant to be used on apps? If so, how can I do it? Let me give you an overview of my situation.

I am restructuring a web site. Some of the pages that used to live under differents urls are now living under the same, with a hash id to denote the particular area of the page the user is in. So, for example, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA, http://www.example.com/problems/topicA and http://www.example.com/equations/topicA, are now in http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#content, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#problems and http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#equations.

Now, I'd like to keep track of users visiting these areas. My initial idea was send a page view when the url is loaded and send a screenview each time the user clicks on the button to change the area of the page (i.e. #content, #problemas or #equations). For doing so, I used something like ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});. As I couldn't see the screenviews in reports, I played a bit, setting the app name, the app id, the installer id etc before sending the screenview, for example:

ga('set', {
     'appName': 'myAppName',
     'appId': 'myAppId',
     'appVersion': '1.0',
     'appInstallerId': 'myInstallerId'
});
ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});

So I can't see the screenviews in the real time reports (though I can see the page views). I can't see them in the regular reports either. I decided to create custom reports with dimensions Page and Screen name. There, I see sometimes screenviews are tracked (I think it happens when I set the appid etc before sending it, but not sure about this point).

Are screen views adecuate for tracking this behaviour or should I use just events, as I'm not on an app at all (just a responsive website)?

By the way, I am using Drupal 7 but that shouldn't make a difference.

Thanks in advance for your time and I hope I am making my question clear enhough.

Answer 1

Technically speaking its probably possible to send both pageviews and screenviews to the same Google Analytics web property.

The problem you will have is seeing the information. The way the Website is set up its either application or web account, Screenviews or pageviews. The reports are different, and you cant swap between them.

So you could send screenviews to a web site web property but you would never be able to analyse it on the website you would have to use the API to rip the data out. That and you would be analyzing apples and cars. Screenviews and pageviews are different they cant be analysed together.

Because of this web property's should be kept separate one for application (screenviews) one for web sites (pageviwes).

You should in my opinion do this using events.

+1 for an interesting question that made me think :)

Answer 2

Is possible, actually in BigQuery you can reach both data and see how this interact, both will have the same schema and will be stored in the same dataset(it is linked the raw data view). Even in the same sessions, you can send pageview and screen views having funny results.

But there is some important consideration when you implement this.

You need 2 different views, one Web View and One App View. Both views will let you access to different information and is not possible on the web interface of Google Analytics to access to both info at the same time. Not sure if with the API you can access to both info at the same time, I think that is totally possible

• In the App View, you will able to see only information of screenview, events and ecommerce.Is also mandatory the App Name parameter on this hits.
• In the Web View, you will able to see only the pageview reports,events and events.
• The ecommerce info and events will be reachable from both views, there is no way to know if this comes from a web or an app ( technically). So is tricky to read this kind of reports in that case.
• Sessions can experiment stranges behaviors. As example gosht sessions coming from the screen view with no page view, sending events.

Taking this into consideration, as Dalmto says, the best to you is use events or sent virtualpage view.

Mixing pageview and screen view is not recommended by Google but is totally possible.This kind of implementations is only useful when you have an embed web-app and a webpage on the same server and you want to have it all on the same dataset, if this case apply, is highly recommended to add a custom dimension to filter the app info on the web view and the web info on the app view and keep both worlds separated.

As the last point, your code is working, I can see the screen info on the desktop property. But not be able to see it in the web view.