Curious what is best practice for tracking 404s?

[DaveBurns]

With a recent site overhaul, I have pages in my stats that someone is using to reach my site but no longer exist. In its reports, Koko seems to be listing the URL that was requested rather than listing the 404 page that they were ultimately shown. I'm wondering if this is a deliberate choice or just an artifact of when Koko records the incoming request. Does this match other analytics tools' (e.g. Google Analytics) behavior? It's not clear to me which is considered "correct" since they're both useful information although it would be nice for analytics purposes to know the aggregate number of views that ended up on my 404 page.

FWIW, if you're taking votes, I'd prefer to see the 404s since I use the Redirection plugin and can already breakdown which page requests resulted in a 404. Although a Koko-specific 404 report would be even better - a report that lists all requests that resulted in a 404.

[dannyvankooten]

Hi @DaveBurns,

In its reports, Koko seems to be listing the URL that was requested rather than listing the 404 page that they were ultimately shown.

Can you elaborate please? On our own sites, if someone visits an unexisting page /something-that-does-not-exist/ then that is also the page that they will be shown, just using the 404 template and with a HTTP 404 status code.

Koko Analytics currently matches the behavior from Google Analytics by recording visits to 404 pages with the URL that the visitor landed on. This helps you see whether a page that no longer exists is still getting traffic.

Although a Koko-specific 404 report would be even better - a report that lists all requests that resulted in a 404.

I like this! I've been playing with this idea over the last few months, so it's nice to hear this from someone else as well.

[DaveBurns]

First, I should make clear that I'm not saying anything is broken. I'm thinking out loud about how 404s are shown in the reports and I'm wondering about ways to better analyze the data being collected.

There is a distinction to be made between what was requested and what was shown. Usually, they are the same. But in your example, /something-that-does-not-exist/ is what was requested but the page/template returned to the visitor was the 404 page. And the HTTP result was not a 200 but a 404. The user-visible title of the page (at least on my site) is "Page Not Found" but the URL that shows up in the Koko reports is /something-that-does-not-exist/. Since I am very familiar with my own site, I know that that URL will result in showing the 404 page but to anyone else looking at my Koko reports, they may think that was a meaningful page hit.

If you pursue this, maybe this is a Pro-level feature.

[dannyvankooten]

And the HTTP result was not a 200 but a 404. The user-visible title of the page (at least on my site) is "Page Not Found" but the URL that shows up in the Koko reports is /something-that-does-not-exist/. Since I am very familiar with my own site, I know that that URL will result in showing the 404 page but to anyone else looking at my Koko reports, they may think that was a meaningful page hit.

That is an excellent point. So by that logic, not tracking 404 hits in the standard "Top pages" list but in a separate section would make a lot of sense. Especially since on a well configured site, they should be buried by all the existing pages anyway.

[DaveBurns]

It's interesting to think about different ways to show this in the reports. At the most basic level, you could still show the URL in the same reports you have but with an annotation "(404)". That would show the number of 404s you get in context with all other page views which is ... maybe useful? You could make a completely separate "404 report" which lists them separately. You could focus on answering very practical questions such as how many visits were there where the final (or only) page was a 404, i.e. "how many visitors don't find what they came for and my 404 page doesn't help them correct that?" Could brainstorm this all day. :-)