Monitoring & Analyzing Error Pages (404s) Using Analytics
I recently wrote a post on the Google Analytics + page about monitoring error pages on websites. The post was well received and generated a healthy discussion on Google+, so I decided to write a more detailed article on the subject here. First of all, what exactly is an error or 404 page? According to Wikipedia “ The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. ” Or, in more general terms, the 404 is the error you get when the page you are looking for does not exist, usually because the link you clicked was broken. Another important question is: why should I care? Often times the 404 is forgotten and no one cares to prioritize its optimization. I believe the answer to prioritization lies on section 2 of this post: by monitoring the percentage of users that arrive at this page you will be in a better position to know if (and how quickly) you should o...