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So you want to set up a goal funnel to track the funnel path / dropoff from when a visitor looks at a product detail page through to checkout?
For most ecommerce sites, this is a pretty basic goal and could probably be accomplished simply by setting up a destination goal page of final checkout completion. But some sites, including ours, have pretty extensive resource sections that would deflate that goal conversion rate.
If your site uses a pretty typical url structure such as domain.com/product/productXYZ/482904/product-name-something/ or even includes a category in the url (domain.com/widgets/product/productXYZ/etc….) you could probably get by by simply adding /product/ in the goal path, as Google Analytics accepts this as a valid regular expression and will return all those detail pages that match.
HOWEVER, if you do something crazy like put the product name or id BEFORE a ‘product’ directory, time to use that noggin. In these instances, we need to setup a regular expression to grab all the dynamically created product detail pages.
Let’s use my site’s url structure as an example. Here’s a typical product detail page url:
http://www.projectorpeople.com/Panasonic-PTAE8000U/Projector/27643
How would you set up a regex to pull back all projector detail pages? Simple.
(.+)(Projector/)(.*)
You might be thinking – “you idiot, you could have just put /Projector/ in there and it would have done the same thing”. I can’t criticize your thinking as you would be correct – except for the fact that we also have a /Projector/ directory that doesn’t have product detail pages and we don’t want to include them. Besides, I could also add (Projectors/|Screen/|Accessories/) to this regex and pull back groups of specific categories.
Regular Expressions are powerful little monsters. If you want to find out if it’s going to work before saving your funnel, simply go to the content > pages section in Google Analytics and enter your regex snippet in the filter box and see what’s returned.
This post by David Pavlicko
