This is a tip specific for Coremetrics. Frequently you want to understand where traffic to a specific page came from. You see a spike in page views and want to understand it, you suspect a blog post may be sending traffic, etc. There's no default report in the Coremetrics Analytics interface that shows you this, so here's a step by step walkthrough to find the data using Coremetrics Explore.
Coremetrics Solution:
Using Coremetrics, one option is to create a report segment that has the criteria of Entry Page is the Page ID of the page you want to investigate. Then you can apply this information to the referring sites report located under Marketing. This will allow you to see the referring sites for that page ID. However, this option will only show high-level referring sites (e.g. pinterest.com, rather than pinterest.com/pin/12345).
To get specific referring URL’s, you must build the report in Explore:
Here are the steps needed to create this report.
1. Go to Explore, then click Reports --> Actions --> Build New Report.
2. Choose Flat List Report --> then click Build
3. In Columns & Metrics data, choose Display Column as Marketing --> Marketing Channel and drag and drop Referring URL into the report box
4. Select up to 5 metrics
5. In Dates & Data Set, select the date range, and select "Run Against All Data" (unless you want to test it first with a Sample Data Set).
6. You don't need to edit anything in the Filter tab. Click on the segment tab and click the New segment button in the lower left.
7. Choose a segment category and name. Under Segment Criteria, choose Criteria Type is Content and set the criteria as Entry Page(s) is ... and enter the page name. Click Apply and Save Segment. [NOTE: If you don't know the page name, navigate to the page using Coremetrics Tools and note what value appears next to Page ID pi:]
8. Back in the Segment window, drag and drop the new segment from the Select Segments box to the Drag and Drop segments box.
9. Skip the Relational Zoom tab and move to Name & Distribution tab. Fill in the Report name box, assign a Report Category, and click submit. The report will now appear on the left hand side. It will be gray until it has completed – you can hit the ‘Refresh data about reports’ button in top right to check.
This Information is very useful, I work as a web analytic specialists and the more COREMETRICS related information you can post on this page the more will help us to apply best practices in the reporting and analysis process.
Many Thanks
Oscar
Thanks for the feedback, Oscar! I will make some more posts specific to Coremetrics.
Hi Ana, I have a second question for you, Is this the best way (or are there any other ways) to track traffic comming from pages such as Pinterest.
Thanks!
Hi Oscar! Sorry for the delayed response, I just saw this.
If you want to track traffic coming from other sites, the easiest way is to go to Marketing > Referring Sites. This will show you a list of all the sites that sent traffic and you can use the search box to find the site you're looking for.
One thing to note, though, is that this report will just show you the high-level domain. If you want to see the exact page on Pinterest that the traffic came from, you'll need to use Explore and choose Display Column = Referring URL.
Hope that helps!
Thanks Ana!!
Ana, is there anything like GA's Secondary Dimensions in Coremetrics?
Applied to this example, you would go to "Entry Pages" report and then choose "source" as a secondary dimension to see the referrals to that particular page, displayed without manually apply a segment.
Hey there, to do this you can go to Explore and make a Flat List report, choosing Entry Page and Marketing Channel as your Display Columns. The regular interface is mostly just for the canned reports so you usually need Explore for these customized ones. GA lets you do all the customization in the main tool so it's more like a combination of Analytics + Explore.