It is common for the audience to come across the 404 error pages, as the content for the website is frequently updated. You have to handle the 404 pages in the best way to make your website reliable to the audience.
You can easily setup the 404 error pages. You will have to include the logo of the company and give an explanation to the visitors for the redirection. You will also have to provide links to the home page and link to report the issue.
It is important for you to know about the 404 and identify them in order to take the necessary actions. With the type of error found you can consider and change the strategies you currently use to reduce the percentage of people seeing the 404 error page. The process may take a lot of time, but it is definitely worth it. There are two ways to monitor the 404 traffic.
You can get the content reports for everything and add them to the dashboard, in Google analytics. With this you can initially add the report for the 404 error. With this you can monitor the number of visits you get to the 404 pages.
You can also monitor the 404 pages, by getting notified each time a visitor reaches the 404 pages, so that you can respond immediately by taking the necessary action. In Google analytics’ admin panel, you can set up the alert notifications for the 404 error pages to get them timely.
Once you identify and locate the 404 error pages, you next step should be to help the users who have landed in these pages. By taking the necessary actions you can guide your visitors to the relevant pages or content they desire.
You can easily find out the pages in your website, that was leading your visitors and find out the pages that contains the broken links, with the use of the Navigation Summary Report. You can also easily determine the percentage of the visitors, who have landed on your 404 pages. You can also distinguish them as, from the internal and external sources.
Having the idea about the URLs will help you to identify the error links and eliminate them. In case if a good number of visitors visiting the ‘About’ get the error page, then you can conclude that there is a broken link in your website, which leads the website to the error page. Though on occasions you cannot find the source of the broken link, you can add a redirect to the error page to the ‘About’ page. You can create the redirect by making use of the report. You will be provided by the original URL, though the 404 error page is displayed.
