Aug 19 2008
Instantly Actionable - The 404 Page
If you do nothing else with your web analytics, please do this: create a custom 404 (page not found) page, tag it, and review it at least monthly. This report helps you in a couple ways:
- It gives you instant insights that are instantly actionable.
- It is user-friendly, giving the user options other than the back button (leaving them on the same page with the same bad link! Ugh!)
First thing is first. Do you have a custom 404 page? If not, set one up. Recently, June Dershewitz wrote a great post about the importance of 404 pages, most notably, custom 404 pages. To figure out if you have a custom 404 page, type www.yourdomain.com/foo into your browser. Do you see something like this? Or, does your 404 look like this:
If your 404 page looks like the above picture, it’s not custom, and is hurting your website and your users! I’ll show you how a little later.
Finding broken links. To find broken links within your own site, you can use tools like W3C Link Checker or Xenu. To find other sites that have broken links that point to your site, you can use either your log files, or an analytics report. In order to use an analytics report, though, you need to have a custom 404 page created and tagged with your analytics code.
So how do you tag your 404 page correctly? It depends on your tool. Check out the help documents for correct 404 tagging for the new version of tracking code for Google Analytics or the older version of tracking code for Google Analytics. Using Omniture you simply name your 404 page appropriately and then look up that page in your pages report.
The good part. So you have your custom 404 page tagged, now what do you do? In your analytics tool, see what sites are referrers to the 404 page. You might see search engines, or email clients. Do you see other sites within your university? Start there. Email the owners of those websites and have them change the URL that links to your site.
If you have access to your log files, take a look at your broken link report. Using your log files doesn’t require a custom 404 page, but I highly encourage a custom 404 page.
Why should you use a custom 404 page regardless of how you track it? Think of your users. Remember? It’s ultimately about the user.
If a user clicks a bad link (whether internal or external) and is assaulted by the ugly default 404 page (see above image), there’s no other option but using the back button. Then the user is confronted with the same link that got them to the 404 in the first place. Not cool! If you have a custom 404 page, you can add some topic links, guide them to your archives, a search function, or, if you’re a customer service site (hello admissions, library, registrar, bursar, helpdesk!) leave a contact number. That way you’re *helping* them find what they need, not just making them hit the back button and fend for themselves.
The bottom line is, whether you use page tags (with your custom 404 page) or your log files, the 404 report gives you instant insights that are instantly actionable. Nice! Have you hugged your 404 report today?
Great great advice. Something I’ve totally overlooked on our college website!
Thanks, Kyle, for the comment.
I actually wrote this post after a thorough cleansing of our own 404 report at work. It hadn’t been done in far too long. It’s on a schedule now, though! : )
[...] other week Shelby Thayer wrote an excellent post titled, Instantly Actionable – The 404 Page. Reading through her post got me thinking this is definitely a Web Standard that every site needs [...]