I have a problem with my Custom Reports in Google Analytics. I'm trying to compare periods but it seems impossible to use Absolute Change sort within Custom Reports. Instead, the same option is available in classic reports. Is absolute change sort option available for custom report? Thank you in advance for your help.
Edit: Unfortunately I can't attach any photo, but I will try to explain better. As you surely know in Google Analytics I can compare data with a previous period. Analytics allows the user to sort the compared data through several Sort Types. There are three Sort Types available: Default, Absolute Change and Weighted. Each one of these takes into account different algorithms to sort data. You can switch to a different sort type just by using the drop-down menu placed beside "Secondary Dimension", above the results table. So, I checked out that In Custom Reports the "Absolute Change" option is never made available: when I try to switch from Default to Absolute type, the entry "Absolute Change" is disabled, so I can't select it. It seems to be a trivial feature of Analytics, and I'm not sure whether it is a limitation of custom reports, or maybe if I configured something wrong.
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I don't even know if "tagging pages" is what I mean.
Essentially, I have a large education website with many types of pages. Specifically, I want to tag our program pages by faculty, level, etc. For example, the Biology program page would be tagged with Science (as its faculty), and Undergraduate (as its level). It's possible that a program could belong to multiple faculties and/or levels (Psychology, for instance, is both a Science program and an Arts program). There is nothing in the URL to signify faculty or level. The website is built in Drupal, in case you know of any modules that could facilitate this.
I want to understand how different faculties/levels/etc perform. I will be building reports in Google Data Studio.
Any guidance would be appreciated!
What you are looking for is called 'content grouping'. If you haven't information in the URL you can define some rules when the page loads and pass the information to Analytics with the pageviews.
You can find more information here:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2853423?hl=en
Then you can get these information from Data Studio.
Because of your multi-value needs, nothing in GA is going to satisfy your requirements out of the box. You will have to do some post-processing, and I am not familiar enough with Data Studio to know where its limits are in that regard.
As the previous poster suggested, Content Grouping is the standard way to create custom aggregations of pages. You can have multiple content groupings, such as Faculty and Level, but a page can be in only one group per grouping (not the clearest terminology but it appears to be what Google uses).
A different option is Custom Dimensions. There are two options here. One is to create custom dimensions for Level and Faculty. Each page can still have only one value per dimension, but you could send a comma-delimited string when a department is in multiple faculties (for instance) and then pull it apart again in a spreadsheet.
The second option is to create a custom dimension for Department directly, and associate each department to the appropriate one or more faculties and levels in your reporting.
How you set the custom dimensions or content grouping will depend on your implementation of GA. If you are using the Google Analytics Drupal module, it says it supports setting custom dimensions as a feature. If you are using Google Tag Manager you can set the dimension value in your tags directly, though of course it will need to decide what value to set on based on either totally enumerated rules you write or something it can read out of the page. Here is some Tag Manager documentation: Content Grouping via GTM; Custom Dimensions via GTM.
If the department is present in the page in some consistently marked-up way you can grab it; if not the Metatag module or one of its schema.org extensions might be able to provide you a spot to set a value for GTM to retrieve.
Is there a way to make an exact replica of a View in Google Analytics?
Based on the documentation here (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3256366?hl=en&fbclid=IwAR2_5523Iz89Be8P6wkXxMla5BiS9NL4DLrzVuJ1ib23WvuDwzq4idnGBa4).
Settings and features controlled at the view level (like filters,
Goals, users and their permissions) are duplicated in copied views.
Cost source links and shared assets (like annotations, Segments, and
alerts) are not duplicated into copied views.
It seems like many items don't get copied across. I also noted that calculated metrics and custom reports are also not copied across.
Is there a way to create an exact replica (excluding the data)?
You can use Google Management API to get/create some setting, like segments (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/config/mgmt/v3/mgmtReference/management/segments?hl=it) and create a feature that automatically creates a view with the desired settings, custom report can be shared, ... however there are some settings that cannot be created in this way either, for example annotations API is not available.
I'm setting up Google Analytics for a website where a user can find an event to attend (concerts, plays, etc.). The results can be filtered by 5 different parameters.
So, unfiltered results would look like: example.com/event-finder/
And filtered results showing concerts in January or February would look like: example.com/event-finder?type=concert&month=jan,feb
I'm struggling to figure out the best way to use the query parameters in Google Analytics to analyze filtering behavior.
Example questions I'd want to be able to pull answers for:
What percentage of results were filtered by type?
What percentage of results were also sorted by month?
What is the most common type filtered by?
I have full access to both Google Analytics and Tag Manager but I suspect I shouldn't do this with events or custom dimensions and that there's got to be a way to use the query parameters to do this in a clean way.
I've tried to use a new view and site search to group the types of filters. Seems like it could work, but seems hacky and limited.
I've considered pushing those values into custom dimensions, but that too seems like overkill.
I've considered pulling content reports into Google Sheets and sorting through things there, but I'm 1) not entirely sure how I'd do that and 2) suspect there may be an easier approach.
Let me know if you have any questions or need more clarification. Thanks!
Have you tried to use "category parameters" when configuring site search (admin -> view settings)? You could set the "type" as a category parameter. You can also enter multiple parameters in there.
Check this screenshot of site search configuration
I want to be able segment analytics data by company once my customers have logged into my website. Being very new to analytics, it seems like there is a couple of ways I could do this.
Set a visitor level custom variable that would signify the company. For instance, _setCustomVar(1, 'customer', 'ABC Corp', 1)
Pass in a custom Url to my _trackPageview calls whose first segment would signify the company. For instance, _trackPageview('/ABCCorp/the rest of the document path, querystring, etc.')
It seems you can't filter on a custom variable so I could not create a view\profile for each company but I could use Segments and Custom Reports off an 'All Web Site Data' view to do that instead.
Going the custom url route seems to be more flexible since I could either filter or use segments.
Are there any other pitfalls or reasons to suggest using one of these two approaches over the other?
This use case is better suited for custom variables.
Changing the URL will make it more difficult to do things like "How many home page views did I get" or "What do clients usually do after they login".
Also, you can create custom reports based on the information you're passing back and include the custom variable information as the first key. Pretty easy to duplicate GA's current top reports in a custom report using the custom variable as the main dimension.
Agree with Tom that CustomVar is a much better and cleaner solution.
You might want to switch to new Universal Analytics and use Custom Dimenions instead. It's even better and you can set up property filters with Custom Dimenions too, so this should cover all your needs.
I was able to setup Google Analytics to send custom variables that I can track.
I'd like to generate a report with UserId / Value and Display all of the pages
that user viewed. (Similar to reports I have seen with IP address on one column,
and viewed pages on the other)
Custom Var 1 : label:'userId' value:'17' scope:'1' (from Chrome Analytics tool)
Google Analytics reporting is pretty complex, so I'm hoping I can get some suggestions on how to create such a report.
i'm battling through google analytics aswell it can be really useful but to get exactly what you want can take some time. This isn't an answer as much as its a list of a few links that i have used along the way and hope they help
http://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/explorer/
In here if you put ga:source ga:referralPath ga:customVarName(n)
This stack overflow answer may also help
Create google analytics profile by filtering using a custom variable
i'll have to look into this myself when i m using custom variables but it look like the advanced segment section may be the way to go.
And you ve probably already seen this but its quite a nice article on custom variables
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingCustomVariables
Let us know hwo you get on...
I think you're going to want to create an advanced segment including your custom variable. This should narrow the data to only that which includes the variable. You can then look at whatever reports you want within that segment.
Using regular expressions should let you better tune the scope of the segment.
You can do this easily in the Megalytic reporting tool. There are widgets that let you create reports which segment data by custom variable. For example, Traffic by Custom Variable, Conversions by Custom Variable. Disclaimer: I am a founder of Megalytic.