One of the first things we do when starting to work with a new client is to check how many people end up on their 404 page. By reducing the traffic to your error page you can increase your conversion rate.
We were recently surprised to find that one new client did not have a unique title for their error page. This makes it very difficult to track visits to the page.
In order to find out if you have a big problem first find the title tag of your 404 page. You can easily do that by writing in a search engine address bar a URL that you know does not exist.
Here is an example: yoursite.com/nonsense90876. When you get to the resultant page look in the Title
Tag bar or go to the source code and search for <title>.
Assuming this is a unique title tag (if it is not then change it now) go to Google Analytics and on the side menu click on Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.Below is a screen shot which shows where to find the “All Pages” link. Then click on “Page Titles” as your Primary Dimension. This is highlighted below.In the Google Analytics search bar type in the title tag of your 404 page.
The result is the number of times your error page is visited. If it is very rare, then you can relax. However if it occurs frequently you need to analyse how to find the broken links. That is a subject for another post.
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