What’s the Best Way to Track 404 Errors?

Author: Guy Sheetrit Updated Date: March 7, 2026 Category: Advanced SEO Techniques , SEO , SEO Basics

It’s a fair and very human fact that we all love tracking positive performance trends and details of the improvement. This is only one side of the coin however and it’s critical that a marketer keeps up to date with any negative themes that emerge from their reporting. As the saying goes, “a stitch in time saves nine”! Keeping your finger on the pulse in this regard will help ease your mind and avoid any catastrophic mistakes from occurring.

Keeping such a close eye on your site data will help give you more of a sense of where users are having trouble getting around your pages or understanding your content. It can give valuable insight into certain areas of your customer journey which might be falling short. 404 errors are a critical metric to keep a close eye on as it represents a direct failure of a link or page URL.

There are several techniques and angles to cover this topic from. We’ll be going over today some common methods for minimizing and measuring your 404 errors.

For more technical SEO insights, explore our Core Web Vitals checklist and SEO fundamentals guide.

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So what is the 404 error?

It’s likely that all of us have come across this page error at some point in our lives. What might not be so clear is what the causes of this error are. The presentation of the 404 itself can vary depending on the site with some placing further graphics or search functions within the page to aid in redirecting the user to other areas of the site that may be of use.

There are a few occurrences of the 404 error that are most common.

Typos – Simple. The user thinks they know the URL off by heart and doesn’t spell it correctly. A benign issue that can still be handled with the above-mentioned formatting to the 404 page.
Links – It’s a common incident that other websites will link through to a page on your site that is either defunct or doesn’t even exist. This can be frustrating as it doesn’t reflect on your page well.
Old links – Separate from the above it’s commonly the case that a portion of your 404 errors will be due to outdated sites that haven’t kept their URLs up to date.
Internal links – They can in some cases be directly down to the owner! Sometimes problems crop up with internal links that need to be fixed in the house

All is well and good. How do we track them?

The easy way

You might already be able to see the path that the user has used via Google Analytics. Picking up on old articles through these page views can sometimes be the only way to get informed on dead links that are still in circulation.

If you know this is due to an error either caused by the title or by the path of the page it’s easy to create 404 errors as a goal within the Google Analytics suite. This is a common practice but does have some limitations – goals are predominantly intended to be to do with KPIs instead. You’ll also have a limit on the number of goals that you can have at a time if you aren’t ponying up for the premium version of Analytics.

A separate method you can use to keep an eye on these is to make use of the Webmaster Tools that are also provided by Google. You can use these to see what sites are linking to your 404 URLs. It can also make this information easier to digest through a range of graphs.

The downside to this information is that it is provided off the back of Google’s own crawlers. This means you can’t reliably have it included in reporting and you also won’t be able to see any details of the rest of the user’s session on your site after they experience the error.

Tag Manager

If you find yourself without access to the full Analytics or Webmaster tools then do not worry! Tag Manager can help.

You’ll need to ensure that your basic tracking of page views is arranged and that the code for the container of Tag Manager is within your 404 templates.

Page headers and titles

You might find that the simplest way to track these problems is to look for what is identified as an actual error on your website.

Usually, you’ll find that the template of an error will have an unaltered page title. An example of this would be Google which has a uniform title of “Error 404 (Not Found)!! 1.”

You can target these titles by using a JavaScript macro. This isn’t too difficult to do. Your first step would be capturing the title of the page by using “document. title”. This works with most browsers.

You’d then make use of a response event tag for the 404 error that would be {{the title of the page}} equals “Google example”.

Keep in mind that your rules are case-sensitive. It’s a useful feature that nevertheless has left many webmasters and marketers scratching their heads if they aren’t careful!

Virtual Page views

One last method for keeping your errors in check is making use of Tag Manager once more with virtual page views. This gives you the benefit of being able to see the data under the Behaviour reports section which provides greater detail of the content. You can also use the page view with other features like a Goal Funnel – just be sure to keep in mind the above-mentioned limitations.

This is easily done by making a page view tag instead of using an event tag. You just need to set the document path to start with 404/ so that it will show clearly when you later come to analyze the data within Analytics.

The firing rule for this one can be any of the above-mentioned methods using the data layer or targeting the header or page title.

Be sure to re-use this rule once done as a blocking rule when it comes to your page view tag. This will avoid corrupting your data with any duplicated hits.

Alerts

Lastly, it comes down to simple best methods to use alerts for your errors. You can use event categories for your alert conditions or page that has a start with condition and value of 404. This will send through emails automatically once your errors go over a specific threshold.

Keep all these practices in mind and you’ll benefit greatly in the reduction of damage to your site and brand as well as a valuable opportunity to improve your customer journey. Turning 404 errors into conversions is doable and your likelihood of retaining visitors and users will go up the more stringent you are with these methods.

Frequently Asked Questions

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This comprehensive guide provides strategies and best practices for achieving success. Following these approaches can help improve your results and competitive advantage.

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Results vary. Most strategies require 3-6 months before significant improvements. Ongoing optimization and consistency are essential for sustainable success.

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While basic implementation can be done independently, professional guidance often accelerates results and helps avoid costly mistakes.

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Key factors include thorough research, consistent execution, quality over quantity, regular performance monitoring, and adapting to industry changes.

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Track KPIs like traffic, conversions, revenue, and engagement rates. Regular analysis helps identify areas for improvement.

Q: What channels should I focus on?

Most businesses benefit from SEO, content marketing, social media, and paid advertising. Start where your target audience is most active.

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Modern digital marketing requires integrated approaches combining multiple channels into cohesive customer experiences. The most successful businesses recognize that consumers interact with brands through complex journeys spanning multiple devices and platforms.

Content Marketing Best Practices

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Technical SEO in 2025: The Foundation That Determines Your Ceiling

Technical SEO is the least glamorous discipline in the search marketing stack — and the most consequential. You can have the best content, the most authoritative backlinks, and the strongest brand signals in your niche, but if Googlebot can’t efficiently crawl and index your site, or if your Core Web Vitals scores are in the bottom quartile, those assets are being systematically undervalued.

The technical SEO landscape in 2025 has expanded significantly. Where technical SEO once meant XML sitemaps and robots.txt management, it now encompasses JavaScript rendering, Core Web Vitals, structured data, site architecture, and increasingly, AI-readiness signals like entity markup and knowledge graph integration.

Core Web Vitals: The Performance Metrics That Directly Impact Rankings

Google’s Core Web Vitals became an official ranking signal in 2021 and have been progressively weighted more heavily since. The three metrics and what they actually measure:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly does the main content of a page load? Target: under 2.5 seconds. The most common LCP killers are unoptimized hero images, render-blocking JavaScript, and slow server response times. Fix priority: compress and convert images to WebP, implement lazy loading for below-fold images, and enable browser caching.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly does the page respond to user interactions (clicks, taps, keyboard input)? This replaced First Input Delay in March 2024. Target: under 200ms. INP problems are almost always JavaScript-related — heavy third-party scripts, main thread blocking, or inefficient event handlers.
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Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides field data (real user measurements from Chrome users) that is the actual data used in rankings — not the lab data from manual tests. Optimize for field data improvement, not just lab score improvement.

Crawl Budget Optimization

Crawl budget — how many pages Googlebot crawls on your site per day — is finite and valuable. Wasting it on low-value pages means high-value pages get crawled less frequently. Crawl budget optimization is critical for sites with 10,000+ pages.

Pages that consume crawl budget without adding value:

Faceted navigation duplicates (color/size/price filters creating unique URLs)
Paginated archives beyond page 2-3
Tag and author archive pages on CMS platforms
Session ID URLs and UTM parameter variations
Staging or development URLs accidentally accessible to crawlers

Management approach: use robots.txt to block parameter-based duplication, implement canonical tags on near-duplicate pages, and configure the URL Parameter tool in Google Search Console to indicate which parameters change page content versus just tracking parameters. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on Voice Search SEO.

JavaScript SEO: The Invisible Technical Barrier

Over 70% of websites now use JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, Next.js) for their front-end. JavaScript SEO is the discipline of ensuring these frameworks don’t create rendering barriers for Googlebot.

Googlebot renders JavaScript, but with significant caveats: rendering happens in a second-wave queue (hours to days after initial crawl), JavaScript errors can prevent content from rendering entirely, and complex client-side routing can prevent proper canonicalization.

The safest architecture for SEO: Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or Static Site Generation (SSG) for all content that needs to rank. Dynamic content (personalization, user-specific data) can be client-side. This hybrid approach gives you the performance and SEO benefits of server rendering without sacrificing the interactivity of modern JavaScript frameworks.