Show custom dimensions values in google analytics - google-analytics

Question

My goal is to have user email address in google analytics reports so I can build custom reports for client.
For this, I added a custom dimensions "cdUserEmailAddress" under admin --> custom definitions --> custom dimensions
I set it's scope to session.
I set the following code in my page to add a test value but it does not add the value anywhere that I can find on google analytics dashboard.
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag() { dataLayer.push(arguments); }
gtag('js', new Date());
dataLayer.push({
'cdUserEmailAddress': 'test#test.com',
'event': 'sessionUserLoggedIn'
});
gtag('config', 'UA-xxxx-x');
ga('create', 'UA-xxxx-x', 'auto');
ga('set', 'cdUserEmailAddress', 'test#test.com');
ga('send', 'pageview');
console.log('working 2');
</script>
This did not work.
I then went to Google TagManager (since one of the articles I read suggested I need to set that up too) and added a user data element there.
Pasted the auto generated code shown below but that did not help either.
<!-- Google Tag Manager -->
<script>(function (w, d, s, l, i) {
w[l] = w[l] || []; w[l].push({
'gtm.start':
new Date().getTime(), event: 'gtm.js'
}); var f = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j = d.createElement(s), dl = l != 'dataLayer' ? '&l=' + l : '';
j.async = true; j.src =
'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=' + i + dl;
f.parentNode.insertBefore(j, f);
})(window, document, 'script', 'dataLayer', 'GTM-xxx');</script>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager -->
What am I missing?
I looked everywhere for this test#test.com value ...by creating a custom report, under Behavior -> Site content --> AllPages...
I find it no where.
Please help
Thanks

Answer 1

First of all, you should be aware, that sending email (or any other personally identifiable information) to Google Analytics is violating the terms of service.
Newertheless, if you decide to go for any other custom data, the following should be changed in your code. Custom dimensions and metrics are not referenced by their names, but by their ID, which can be looked up in the administration panel of Google Analytics. For further details please check this detailed guide.
So this part:
ga('set', 'cdUserEmailAddress', 'test#test.com');
Becomes:
ga('set', 'dimension1', 'your non-pii data'); //update the number according to your settings
Also, please note, that generally it's not suggested to send data to the same Analytics property directly from ga() calls and GTM, as you need to maintain your tracking settings in parallel, and you can easily send pageview twice, which is usually not desired.
If you decide to go for GTM, then you need to set up a dataLayer variable, that references your key used in the dataLayer (cdUserEmailAddress in your present case), and you need to use this variable in the Universal Analytics settings, where you can set up custom dimension values, also by referring their IDs.