My Step-By-Step Blueprint For Learning and Mastering Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

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Last Updated: November 30, 2022

In this article, I will show you how to track web pages with zero traffic in both Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Universal Analytics (GA3).

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) does not report on web pages with zero pageviews in a selected time period.

However,

GA4 reports on web pages with zero pageviews on certain days and one or more pageviews on other days in a selected time period.

Thus the concept of zero traffic is time-bound.

Almost every web page on your website got traffic at some point in its lifetime.

Looking at your GA4 reports with a very large time frame, you may see a pageview recorded for almost every page on your website. 

The web pages with zero pageviews do not add value to your business’s bottomline. They do not generate any traffic.

By identifying such web pages, you can either update them to increase their search engine ranking position or repurpose their content.

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Web Pages with less than 30 pageviews in the last month or any month

Note: GA4 uses the ‘views‘ metric to report on pageviews.

If a web page has fewer than 30 pageviews in the last month or any month, it means it got zero pageview on one or more days of the month.

This is the easiest way to determine zero-traffic pages on your website. 

No website crawl, no Excel hacks, and everyone can do it pretty easily with just a few clicks.

Follow the steps below to track web pages with zero traffic in GA4

Step-1: Login to your GA4 property.

Step-2: Click on ‘Admin‘ from the left-hand side navigation menu:

Step-3: Click on the ‘Reporting Identity‘ link under the ‘Property‘ column:

Step-4: Click on the ‘Show All‘ link:

Step-5: Click on ‘Device-based‘ and then click on the ‘Save‘ button:

GA4 applies an unspecified data threshold to prevent a user from inferring the identity of individual users.

Because of the data threshold, you may not see the web pages in your GA4 reports, which got very few pageviews.

By changing your reporting identity to ‘device-based’ you can see more data in your reports.

Step-6: Click on the ‘Confirm‘ button:

Step-7: Click on Explore from the left-hand side menu:

Step-8: Click on the ‘Blank’ exploration report template:

Step-9: Name your report ‘Pages with zero pageviews’:

Step-10: Set the date range to the last 30 days:

Step-11: Click on the + button next to ‘DIMENSIONS‘:

Step-12: Search for the ‘Page Path + query string’ dimension, click on the checkbox next to it and then click on the ‘Import‘ button:

You should now see the imported dimension listed under the DIMENSIONS section:

Step-13: Click on the + button next to METRICS:

Step-14: Search and select the following metrics one by one in the exact order as mentioned below and then click on the ‘Import‘ button:

1. Views
2. Sessions
3. Engaged Sessions

You should now see all the imported metrics listed under the METRICS section:

Step-15: Double click on the dimension ‘Page Path + query string’ so that it is automatically added to the Rows section:

Note: When you double-click on the ‘‘Page Path + query string’ dimension, you won’t see any change to the canvas on the right. But the dimension has been added to the canvas. When you start adding metrics to the canvas, you will see the dimension(s) added to the canvas.

Step-16: Double click on the following metrics one by one, starting from the very top, so that they are automatically added to the blank canvas on the right:

1. Views
2. Sessions
3. Engaged Sessions

You should now be able to see the dimensions and metrics added to the report canvas on the right:

Step-17: Sort the ‘Views’ column on the canvas in descending order by clicking on the ‘Views’ column header:

Your report should now look like the one below:

From the screenshot above, we can conclude that many URLs are reported multiple times.

And this happened because the URLs contain query parameters.

To clean up the report, we would need to exclude query parameters.

Step-18: Scroll down to the ‘FILTERS‘ section under ‘Tab Settings‘ and then click on the button ‘Drop or select dimension or metric‘:

Step-19: Click on ‘Page Path + query string’ dimension from the drop-down menu:

Step-20: In my case, I would set the match type to ‘does not contain‘, the expression to ‘?‘ and then click on the ‘Apply‘ button:

You may need to set up a different filter depending on the query parameters you want to exclude from the URLs.

Now you can see the list of all the web pages which got zero pageviews on certain days in the last month:

Step-21: Download the report (click on the ‘Export Data‘ button) and then update the articles or repurpose them.

Note: You would need to append the domain name to the URIs in either Excel or Google Sheets.

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Follow the steps below to track web pages with zero traffic in Universal Analytics (GA3):

Step-1: Navigate to your GA3 reporting view.

Step-2: Navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report:

Step-3: Sort the data table by ‘Pageviews‘ metric in descending order:

From the screenshot above, we can conclude that many URLs contain query parameters which make the report hard to understand.

To clean up the report, we would need to exclude query parameters.

Step-4: Click on the ‘advanced‘ button to apply an advanced filter to the data table:

Step-5: Set up your filter depending on the query parameters you want to exclude from the URLs and then click on the ‘Apply’ button:

Now you can see the list of all the web pages which got zero pageviews on certain days in the last month:

Step-6: Download the report and then update the articles or repurpose them.

Note: You would need to append the domain name to the URIs in either Excel or Google Sheets.

Finding web pages with zero pageviews in the last month

Maybe you are unsatisfied with finding ‘1 pageview a month’ web pages.

You also want to know the web pages that haven’t got a single pageview in the last month, which are truly dead.

There are a couple of methods to find zero pageview pages. I will show you the one which is easiest to implement. 

Follow the steps below:

Step-1: Open Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool. It is a powerful website crawler that can also communicate with Google Analytics API. I used this tool a lot for tag auditing.

Step-2: Go to the ‘Configuration‘ menu and then click on the ‘Spider‘ menu item:

Step-3: Uncheck the following checkboxes to speed up your website crawl:

1. Check Images
2. Check CSS
3. Check JavaScript
4. Check SWF
5. Check External links

If you start the website crawl without unchecking these boxes and your website has got tens of thousands of web pages, then it may take forever to complete the crawl.

Moreover, we don’t need image files, CSS files, JavaScript files, etc. for our analysis.

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Step-4: Again, navigate to the ‘Configuration‘ menu and then click on API Access > Google Analytics:

Step-5: Click on the ‘Connect to New Account’ button in the ‘Google Analytics Configuration’ dialogue box:

You will then be redirected to a new web page in your browser, where you will see the following similar message:

Step-6: Click on the ‘Accept‘ button. Screaming frog tool can now access your Google Analytics data via API.

Step-7: Select the Google Analytics account, Property and view whose data you want to analyse from the drop-down menus:

Select the GA view that has no filters and contains all of your website traffic data.

Step-8: Click on the ‘Date Range’ tab and select the last month date as shown below:

Step-9: Click on the ‘ok’ button to close the ‘Google Analytics Configuration‘ dialog box. 

You have now configured both your crawler and Google Analytics.

You are now ready to start the website crawl.

Step-10: Enter your website URL and then click on the ‘start‘  button to start the website crawl:

Step-11: When the crawl is finished, click on the ‘Analytics‘ tab:

Step-12: Select ‘No GA data‘ from the ‘Filter‘ drop-down menu and then click on the ‘Export‘ button to download the data into excel:

Step-13: Open the downloaded CSV file (named analytics_no_ga_data.csv) in excel. This file contains the list of all those web pages which got zero traffic in the last month.

However, this file could also contain those web pages which were crawled but would never be reported by Google Analytics.

These pages could be:

#1 Web pages with 301 status code

#2 URLs which are not really web pages (like https://www.optimizesmart.com/http:www.optimizesmart.com).

#3 URLs with a lot of weird query parameters.

#4 URLs that have got server-side issues (4xx or 5xx errors)

The fastest way to get rid of all such web pages is to filter out only those pages which have got 200 status code:

Finding web pages with zero pageviews using sitemap.xml

To find out pages with zero page views, you first need to have a list of URLs for your site.

If your site is medium size and has only less than 500 pages, then we can use sitemap.xml.

Step-1: Create a list of URLs from the sitemap.xml and remove the domain names from the URL. If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, then you can create one by using https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Step-2: Navigate to https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ website and enter your website URL to create an XML sitemap and click on ‘Start’.

Step-3: Once the scan is complete, you will see a status like the one below, which includes the time taken to scan, pages scanned etc. Click on ‘View sitemap details’.

Step-4: You can either download or view your XML sitemap.

Step-5: Now, copy all the pages on your website into an Excel file and remove the domain name so it is easier to compare it with the Google Analytics report, which doesn’t include the domain name. 

For example, for https://www.optimizesmart.com/about-us, you would remove the domain name, so the list only has the pathname, i.e. /about-us.

Step-6: Now, login to your Google Analytics report and click on the ‘Behavior’ tab from the left-hand menu.

Step-7: Click on ‘All Pages’ under the ‘Site content tab’ menu and select a date range of at least five to six months from the date range selector.

Step-8: After selecting the date range, click on ‘Export’ above the date selector and export to ‘Excel (XLSX)’.

Step-9: Add this data to the Excel spreadsheet created earlier containing the sitemap URLs. Using an Excel formula, check if the URLs captured in Google Analytics match with the sitemap URLs.

To make this task easy, I used the sample Google spreadsheet shared by James from the Beantin website.

Step-10: You just have to replace the URLs in A and column C with your sitemap and Google Analytics URLs.

Note: you can copy this spreadsheet and use it to find the pages with zero page views.

Step-11: All the pages with “No” are the pages that have zero pageviews in your Google Analytics reports.

However, it would be difficult to do this manual process if you have a website with more than 500 pages.

You need to use another alternative to find the pages with zero views.

Use the Screaming Frog tool I discussed earlier.

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