Sometimes you just need to see how visitors arrived at a specific page on your website. You may want to know about the referring domain, or maybe even which pages on your own website referred users to a particular other page. This also works for a multitude of other uses. Pretty much anything you can find out about a website, you can also find out about a particular page.
For GA4:
For Google Analytics Classic:
You can watch the video, otherwise I have basic instructions here.
Traffic Source of Specific Page – GA4:
- From the GA4 dashboard home, click Reports -> Acquisition -> User acquisition or Traffic acquisition
- In the top right, click the pencil icon to “Customize report”
- Under “Report Filter” click “Add filter”
- In “Select Dimension” type “Landing”, find “Landing page + query string” and select it
- NEW: For “Match Type” select “exactly matches” (this wasn’t a feature or requirement when I made the video)
- For “Value”, select the page(s) you wish to see data for, then press “Ok” and then “Apply”
At this point you can see the general source channels for this page, but if you want to see specific referrers, continue to the next steps: - Under “Report Data”, click “Dimensions” -> Click “Add dimension” at the bottom and find/click on “Page referrer” and press “Apply”
- In the bottom left of the screen above where your data rows are labeled, click the dropdown to select a new dimension, and select “Page referrer”
Voila! You’re now seeing all of the referrers to this page.
Traffic Source of Specific Page – Google Analytics Classic:
1. Go to your Analytics Dashboard, and go to Behavior -> Behavior Flow -> Site Content -> All Pages
2. Find the page you want to view data for, and click on it
3. Find where it says “Secondary Dimension,” and go to Behavior -> Full Referrer. This will show you the full paths to pages that referred visitors to this particular page. Or, you could do Behavior -> Previous Page Path to determine which pages on your own website led visitors to this specific page.
The possibilities are endless! You can mess around with the datasets and also do searches to narrow down pages containing certain strings in their URL, etc.
74 Comments on “Google Analytics + GA4 – Traffic Source of Specific Page”
Appreciate the GA4 info but I don’t see the same option. After I add “Landing page +query string” to the dimension, the only option I see is “Match Type”? GA4 is the worst! lol
Yeah, they added a new feature. For “Match Type” select “Exact Match” and the rest will all be the same!
Thanks so much for this! I have made my report, but it only shows the last 28 days of info instead of the last year. I was part of G4 prior to the mandatory change. Is there something else that could be causing this?
You just need to change your date range at the top.
Anyone know how this is done in GA4? I can go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens and see a list of my pages but cannot click on any page to get info on just that page. Thanks.
I just updated the article to demonstrate how to do it in Google Analytics 4. Honestly it was a little tricky to figure out at first but it makes sense now.
Enjoy!
Thanks.
This post is very helpful, I was able to figure out the local articles that are referring to our sales pages.
This post is very helpful, I was able to figure out the local articles that are referring to our sales pages.
What’s the best way to track how people are making their way to a certain page down to the link level. For example “on our home page are they using the top menu, footer menu, or possibly a link from a content block somewhere in the middle of the page to get there?
Hi Brian –
I’m still learning GA but what I’m trying to find is the following:
What was my organic search traffic (primarily Google) for each page at four different points in time — 9, 6, 3 months ago and today. I’m trying to find out how each page has trended over that period to see what affect the algorithm changes have had on my site.
Thanks.
You could just follow the regular instructions, but change the date range to see the dates you want.
Hi Brian!
How do you track referrals from other WordPress blogs now that WordPress is auto-adding the noreferrer tag? This has been driving me nuts since early in the year and unless I use UTM codes, which are only possible if I created the html, I cannot see referral traffic from other bloggers. I can see residual traffic from older posts, but not from recent posts because of this tag.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Lory
I wanted to know the amount of traffic to one of my service page. I was struggling to find it in google analytics. Your post could helped me to find the traffic to my page.
Thanks for sharing.
Hello Brian, not sure if this is outside the scope of this post but was wondering if you had any information on why I continue to get traffic to pages with the path “/page/’page#’ on my website when these pages do not exist. Any insight would be appreciated.
Odds are that you have some links to those pages elsewhere in the web or even within your own site. Either that, or there is some known exploit in your site platform that utilizes those URLs, and hackers are simply checking the pages to see if they can take advantage of it.
Hey thanks for sharing this, helped me a alot.
Glad I could help!
Is there a way to create a redirect from a specific SOURCE to a page to go to a different page?
Ex – according to Google Analytics, there is a referral from a Quora article directing people to a page that is not relevant, so I want to have any traffic from this specific Quora url source to go to a specific (or different) page.
Can this be done on the backend of the website or in Google? and how?
Thanks!
I’ve never done it but yes, it should be theoretically possible. Modifying your .htaccess file would probably work. Example here: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/51931/conditional-redirect-based-on-referring-source
How would this work on a larger website with hundreds of pages? If I want to find a page, I can’t just look at the All Pages view and spend hours finding a specific page…how can i just type in the URL?
thanks
Ron
Just use the search box to the right and enter in all or part of the page URL and it should come right up.
Hi,
Wanted to find out, is it possible to do the following:
– Drill down to the number of people who visit a page historically posted i.e. How many people today or during 2018 visited pages that where posted during 2015 or 2016 from a behaviour point of view?
Can I use the Behavior Flow report to learn where/how users came from and went to a certain landing page on my site (not the home page)? I want to see not only where people came from when they hit my landing page (not my home page), but also what they did after they hit it (went to another page, completed an event, dropped off, etc). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Hi Brian,
Nice video I would . like to know how do I track sessions ina an specific page of my website. Do I have to create an specific segment in audiences part or where can I check it out.
Would be very helpfull.
Have a nice day,
Carla 🙂
Good morning,
I am trying to determine if some of my audience is coming from a specific website with a link to mine. It appears those are getting lumped into (direct) but I need to be able to pull them out. Can Analytics do this? Why do some acquisitions from other sites get lumped into Direct?
I have an old blog page which suddenly started getting traffic to it. I did what your tutorial said and I found out that the traffic is coming from Google. How do I find out what are the keywords people are looking for that makes google direct them to this specific blog page and why did this suddenly happen? literally a blog page fro, two years ago…
Hi there,
Under Behavior I don’t have the rest of those options… mine shows Behavior –> New vs. Returning –> Frequency & Recency –> Engagement. Where do I find the options you mentioned above?
Thank you so much for this! Phew! I was looking for this info everywhere and you gave me what I came here for.
Thanks a lot 🙂
Hi Brian,
Nice video there. I was actually looking for an answer to a muddle regarding one of the blog articles on my website. So, while going through the analytics for the given time set when it was published, the total page views of my entire blog (I filtered the page for /blog) were way less than the views on that single blog. Could that be due to paid promotion? Even if so, how come the traffic ain’t showing in the analytics?
can you please help me understand how come that single blog had more than 60k views when the entire blog page itself had less than 30k visitors in the given time frame.
Thanks
Hard to say… Can you provide a screenshot maybe?
This doesn’t show me which domain name the traffic is coming from. I have a bunch of domain names I own and I redirected all of them to a page on my website so I can see which domain names still get traffic so I can renew them and which ones I should just let expire due to no traffic.
What? Sure it does! It should give the full domain name and path. Some are shortened if they are know, like “google” or “bing” for example.
We have a domain name we used over the summer (a very easy one to remember) to help Teens access our site and we set it up to redirect to our Teens page. I am not seeing the url anywhere under Full Referrer. If it was remembered by any teens and used, it would be showing up, correct? I wasn’t sure if, on the contrary, it would have been designated as a (direct) referrer since a user wouldn’t actually arrive from a different site.
I believe that redirections don’t show up as referrals, they show up as “direct” traffic. So there wouldn’t be a “full referrer”, since it isn’t a referral.
Both the video and text instruction was great! Like other’s I had searched for some way to get started playing about Google Analytics; but things were either too cryptic or described like you already were vastly familiar with Google Analytics. The other problem I encountered was instructions that started way back to setting up your site with Google Analytics and barely touching on how to use it.
I work in a site that is already existing and was turned loss to figure my way around Google Analytics. So again thanks for giving a terrific starting point so clearly.
No problem, I’m glad I could help!
Also, love the fact that you have a video option and a text-based instruction on the same page!
Whichever people prefer 🙂
Have to comment, I’ve done a fair bit of googling for GA advice and guidance over the last year and I have to say this is far and away the most useful, concise and succinct guide I have found. Cheers 🙂
This is so very helpful. I was getting desperate to pull numbers for a specific page on our website and I stumbled upon this tutorial. Thanks!
Wow, this was so helpful. Thank you for taking the time to do this! I’ve got a single page on my blog that is very old and is still being visited MUCH more than all of my other blogposts and pages. The traffic is all coming from Google but I’d like to know why that page in particular is coming up and what people are searching for. Is there a way to figure that out? Thanks!
This definitely helped, but I think I need a bit more? Maybe you can help. Trying to figure out why traffic is down to particular pages Year Over Year. Is there a way I can see where traffic came from on a particular day, or range, in the past? For instance…if I got 1000 hits on page ABC today, and 10,000 hits on page ABC on this day last year…how can I figure out what happened to the traffic (maybe I need to restrategize my SEO to focus on different keywords…but what keywords, that’s what I’m trying to figure out)
You could simply narrow down the date range, and take a look at the traffic sources for that range. I assume you’ll get some data there, which should guide you to the reasons!
This was just what I needed! Thanks, from Vancouver, BC
Glad I could help out!
Great, clear, helpful!
Thanks so much. Clear, simple and easy directions to locate something that would have taken me much longer to find. You’re awesome.
Glad I could help 🙂
Great insight, learned few new tricks in here for our web app Taskade. Thanks!
Hello. Thank you for your video. It’s great but doesn’t quite solve my problem which I think might be similar to the point made by Tristan. When I look at the unique pageviews on my particular page I have 14 but when I add the secondary dimension of full referrer or source I am only then shown two sources – each with two views. What was the source of my other 10 views? I thought full referrer would have shown me internal referrals as well but alas it doesn’t seem so. Do you have any insight? Please!
Selecting the secondary dimension of “Behavior” -> “Landing Page” will show you which page people first landed on your site from. In many cases, this will only list the current page (because this page WAS the first page they visited).
Also note that in your case (if I’m understanding you right), it’s possible and even likely that only 4 of your views were referrals. The other 10 may have been search engine hits or direct.
Can I see how much traffic I am getting from individual websites such as Facebook, Stumbleuopn, Tumblr etc. directly on the front without having to go through this path for each page everytime?
I mean
Facebook – 100 sessions
Tumblr – 30 sessions etc.
Just like we see Organic, Social, Referral etc.
Like for all pages you mean? Yes, just go to Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Source/Medium. This will show you all of the sources, including all referrals!
Thank you for the video! super helpful!
Can you tell me how I can change the timeperiod of the report? The default view is weekly I think. Can I see YTD or choose specific timeperiods to run the report?
You simply adjust it in the top-right like you would any other report! You can select any timeline you wish.
Thank you so much. These are the first directions for doing something in google analytics that make sense and actually worked!!
Helpful, for sure. We posted an ad on two social media platforms. I found the landing page stats, but when I click on Previous Page Path – it shows an internal link. How do I see from which social media avenue they saw the ad?
The first metric I list (Full Referrer) should show where they originally came from, not the previous page on your own site. So it should tell you what you want to know!
In this report, what does it mean when the page has the same previous page but it’s not the “entrance”?
I assume that means they visited more than 2 pages!
Hi,
When looking at the Source for a given Page, will it only be counted if that Page was the landing page?
I’m interested in seeing for a given Page, regardless of whether that page is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc page in their session, how many pageviews that Page got from users that came from a specific Source.
Since Source is a session level dimension and Page is a hit level dimension, I’m thinking that if a user did this:
(Source = Website A) –> Page 1–> Page 2
Then I would see that Page 1 had a Source of Website A, whilst Page 2 would not have a Source at all.
Can you help me out?
Thanks!
That is an interesting thought, and something I hadn’t considered before. Since I believe you are right: source is a session-level dimension; I think the “source” should be the same for a given user no matter which pages they view. Thus, in your example, a hit to “Page 2” would give a “source” of “Website A”. I’d have to run some tests to confirm but I think that is the case.
Thank you so much for this! Rarely find articles talking about finding this statistics.
Hi Brain,
We would like to see traffic source for only to particular subsite and lists.
Can you please help me to refined my GA report for only subsite .
What do you mean by “subsite”? Like a subdomain?
Thanks.
Thank you! I have been looking around at how to do this for so long.
Hi Brian,
Thanks a lot, very useful indeed. One question, can you also identify traffic coming from emails on a specific page? Is it considered as external domain?
Thanks in advance.
Flo.
You can indeed! I’m no expert with email, but I did find this article that seems to explain it pretty well: http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-analytics/email-campaign-tracking-with-google-analytics/
Super helpful. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you!! This was super helpful!
Awesome Post.
Solved my issues with a click
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the video! It was really helpful and was just the info I was looking for. 🙂