In google analytics property settings, what difference does the Default URL makes

Question

I'm setting a new property on my google analytics account, and one of the fields I have to fill out is Default URL:

My question is what does it matter? What does it affect? I see that GA collects data I send no matter what URL I've defined there, and I don't seem to see that URL in the reports I'm looking at, so what am I missing here?

Answer 1

If you go to the behavior/site content report and click the tiny icon to the right of the page path dimension (an arrow pointing to the upper right) the url will be prepended to the page path to open the page in question in a new window. Plus it will be used as the domain name in the in-page analysis.

I don't think the setting affects data collection in any way.

To back this up here the relevant quote from the documentation:

Website's URL: The domain name of website you're tracking, e.g. www.mysite.com. This information is used by the Content reports, including In-Page Analytics.

"Used in the reports" confirms that it is not used in collection.

Answer 2

In addition to the In-Page Analytics, the Default URL setting is used for cleaning the data. According to point 6 in this article http://online-behavior.com/analytics/accuracy:

For example if you tell it "index.php" is your default page, the "/index.php" in your content reports will now be lumped in with "/" into one clean row.