Tip of the Week: anchor URLs

Tracking anchor URLs

One-pager or one-page websites are popular and have many advantages when it comes to design compared to classic multi-page websites. However, they usually pose a challenge for analysts when so-called anchor URLs are used for navigation.

What are anchor or jump mark URLs?

One-page websites often contain a navigation that naturally does not refer to suitable sub-pages, but directly to the appropriate sections of the page. This is because one-pagers can be very long, especially on mobile devices, and users are known to be impatient and do not want to scroll “forever” to the desired content. Anchor tags are thus used to refer to a specific section of the page.

These URLs for instance look like this:

Why is tracking anchor or jump mark URLs challenging?

Navigation clicks can also be easily tracked for one-pagers using a CSS selector or event tracking script. However, page impressions are generated in the standard with every link call – not differentiated, but always only with the URL or the page title without the jump mark.

In the example above, with the URL:

It’ s as simple as that in etracker Analytics:

To track differentiated page views with anchor tags or jump labels, there is a special function in the settings under Settings → Account → Data enrichment:

Usually it makes sense to generate the page name automatically from the URL.

Afterwards, the separate pages can be used as usual in the configuration of website target processes and, of course, evaluated in the click path report, for example.

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