Identify 404 pages

I'm trying to work out a way to identify pages that are getting a 404 error when people try to go to them. One of the main reasons is to see the impact of unpublishing a page or group of pages.

I've considered using the page title, but since Clicky uses one title for a given url, it doesn't distinguish between before and after unpublishing a page.

Any advice would be welcome.

404 means the page didn't load. So that means the tracking code for Click won't load either. It won't be tracked.

You'd have to get a web log program like webalizer.org.

It can load a 404 error page, which can include the tracking code and give a 404 response in the response header. For example, https://www.google.com/thisshouldbeanerror

Yeah but he was referring to the browser 404 error, not his 404 page.

I assume you're talking about pages you unpublish from your own site on the same domain? If that's the case, you can do this by adding a custom error page to your site for 404 errors. If you're not familiar with this, I can elaborate further.

I was bored, and had seen this post for a while, so I wrote a JavaScript to facilitate this. It uses a custom data tag, which you can then use to filter data. Combined with a custom 404 page, it will have the same link as your previously published page, then you can compare page views to that site and subtract how many have this custom data to get your statistics. Slightly crude, but it works.

Due to the limitations of the forums, I'm going to host the html snippet on my google drive and put that as the single link I'm allowed to insert per post here.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0KRMsyBswBCbXprU1lOSzRvZVk

Oh, I forgot to mention...the 404 page must load without redirecting so you preserve the URL of the unpublished page, or this won't work. For example, on my domain, which I'm not quite ready to share yet, but I'll use a generic one here, if you go to

https://mysite.com/some-random-page

And that page doesn't exist anymore, the 404 page will load, and the URL is the same, hence the 404 page would load this code and track that the page doesn't exist anymore.

I use WordPress, and it has that behavior, but I'd have to look how to do it manually. Maybe your site has that set up already.