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URL grouping

Many sites have paths that carry an identifier: /dashboard/1270407413480165438/activity, /dashboard/1502794654712860702… Every visitor then produces a unique page, and your Pages breakdown scatters into hundreds of rows seen only once. URL grouping folds those dynamic segments into a single template — /dashboard/:id/activity — and merges all of them into one aggregated row.

It is on by default and applies to the Pages, Entry pages and Exit pages breakdowns.

What gets grouped

With no configuration at all, a heuristic folds segments that look like identifiers to :id:

  • purely numeric segments of at least 6 digits (Discord snowflakes, database IDs);
  • UUIDs (8-4-4-4-12 hexadecimal format);
  • long hexadecimal tokens (at least 24 characters: Mongo ObjectId, md5, sha).

Short, meaningful segments are kept: a 4-digit year like /2024/ or a small ordinal like /page/42 stay as-is.

Override patterns

For cases the heuristic misses, add patterns in the settings card. They are ordered and evaluated before the heuristic — the first matching pattern wins.

  • Name or force a grouping the heuristic misses — an article slug, for instance:

    /blog/:slug

    /blog/my-first-post and /blog/gdpr-analytics then group under /blog/:slug.

  • Pin a path raw (opt it out of grouping) — a fully literal pattern renders itself and overrides the heuristic:

    /2024/recap

A pattern starts with /; each segment is either a literal ([a-zA-Z0-9._~-]+) or a :name placeholder.

Scope: display only

Grouping changes only how pages are shown in the page breakdowns. The raw path is still stored as-is: turn grouping off and the raw rows come back — no data is lost.

Most importantly, goals, conversions and page filters still match on the raw path. A pageview goal on /dashboard/1502794654712860702 never changes meaning because the page now displays as /dashboard/:id — your existing goals keep their behaviour.

Nothing to change on your site: URL grouping is a dashboard setting. No snippet, script or wrapper to re-copy or redeploy.

Managing grouping

The URL grouping card lives in the site’s Settings.

  1. Open your site, then the Settings tab.
  2. The Group dynamic URLs switch turns the heuristic on or off.
  3. Under Override patterns, add one pattern per line, in the order you want. An invalid pattern is flagged as you type.
  4. Save: the change applies to the breakdowns right away.

What’s next