Features used: Site overview, Journey analysis, Page comparator, Session replay, Alerts
Time: 30 min.
Here are the potential errors you can track on your site using this method:
Identify typical technical errors | Identify typical functional errors |
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Set up
1. Create an Error Page in your Template Mapping
- In order to analyze an error page, make sure you have a dedicated page within your mapping so that you can visualize the Error Pages in Zoning Analysis and Page Comparator, and create Goals and Segments.
- Using our tracking tag assistant, check if these pages can be identified by URL or Custom Variable.
- If you do not have custom variables set up you will need to copy the error either from the path or the query and create the page around the error condition in the URL.
- Create a Goal around having viewed the Error Page
2. You'll need to create a View Goal before you can create a segment around having viewed a specific page.
- To do this, select the Mapping with the Error Page in Goals and create a View Goal.
- Once your goal is created you can apply this goal to create a Segment around visitors who viewed an Error Page.
- You can also create Goals around visitors who Clicked on a Zone to help track the number of visitors clicking.
3. Create a Segment around users having viewed the Error Page
- This will allow you to filter by the Population who Viewed a specific page, in this example, the error page.
- To do this, select the 'goal' condition in the segment creator, and choose the goal you have created from the drop-down.
Step-by-step
Where do users find pages with errors in their journey? Let's look at the big picture and work our way towards a more granular analysis starting with Site overview:
1. Go to Site overview (Contentsquare platform homepage) to identify what percentage of All users within a certain time period viewed a page with errors by applying the Goal 'Viewed Error Page'.
2. Investigate user journeys in Journey analysis that saw the page with an error by applying the segment Viewed Error Page. This highlights the journeys of the population of users that saw the Error Page.
What did users do after the error page?
- Use Journey Analysis to highlight where users are seeing the error page.
- Click on “Journeys after the page” and select the error page.
- Apply Journey’s After A Page to identify what journey users are taking after viewing an error page.
- Identify if users are likely to exit after viewing the Error Page or continuing on in their journey.
Are users incentivized to return to the previous page or homepage?
How did users get to the error page?
Once you have visualized this journey, turn on Reverse Journey, and identify how users are reaching the Error Page.
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Is there a main page causing the error?
If so, you may want to investigate this one. Create the segment “Have viewed [the problematic page] THEN viewed error page” (using 'page viewed' condition). Look at the zoning metrics of this page using the segment. -
Is it a landing page?
If so, check the URLs for any surprising UTM parameters that may suggest acquisition errors.
You can then go on to apply the different acquisition source segments to identify exactly what paid campaign users are interacting with the broken URL.
3. In Page Comparator, select the mapping with the Error Page and star the Error Page to highlight the page at the top of the screen.
Here you can quickly identify the impact this page is having on your site.
- Looking at Bounce Rate we can see that almost half of the users that land on the Error Page leave without ever seeing a second URL.
- It is also important to look at the Number of sessions compared to the entire site to understand how many users sessions are seeing an Error Page.
- Views/Sesions is also important because it allows you to identify if visitors are seeing multiple error pages during the session.
- It is also important to identify if there are any pages that may be driving users to view an Error Page. To see this, we can use Comparison mode to compare where we “Include” the segment for viewed the Error Page and “Exclude” the segment for viewed the Error Page. With this comparison we can identify if there are any pages where there are differences between these two segments.
4. In Session Replay, we can apply the Segment "Viewed Error Page" to visualize the different journeys where a visitor came in contact with an Error Page. We can also use the sequential segment we created previously to view the specific page.
Apply filters by 'Duration' and 'URLs Viewed' to identify specific scenarios.
For example, if you set URLs viewed to 1, you can identify users who landed on an Error Page and bounced.
Go further
Bug Detection and Frustration with Alerts
Once you have identified known errors on your site, you can begin monitoring them. With Contentsquare, you can identify where users are coming into contact with these bugs and monitor their frequency.
Here are different examples of Alerts you can set up:
- Site:
- Views of error page
- Views of Out of Stock Product Page
- Page:
- Exit rate i.e. checkout
- Load time
- Zone:
- Click recurrence i.e. Checkout next step CTA
Steps to take after receiving an Alert
For example: “The number of sessions on the page “Errors” has increased by 35.4% on the segment “All visitors” on Mobile.”
- In the Journey Analysis module, use the Reverse Journey: Journeys Before a Page, to understand how users are reaching the Errors page.
- Use the Journeys After a Page to understand the impact of users reaching an exit page. Are users exiting or are they continuing to navigate?
- After you identify the page leading to errors, use that page in Zoning Analysis and/or Session Replay to find the exact element causing the issue.