Google Analytics Query Custom Channel Grouping - google-analytics

Question

I am trying to pull a Custom Channel Grouping for Transaction IDs from Google Analytics. The marketing group has defined a couple of custom Channel Groupings in GA and they want me to pull these fields. I can not find any documentation anywhere which discusses this. It's not a custom dimension and it's not a custom variable. Has anyone else had to do this? Is it possible or do I have to re-implement the rules outside of GA?

Answer 1

Short answer: this is not currently possible (as of June 2015) in the Google Analytics API.
The best workaround I have found is to rebuild the channel grouping in the logic of the API query. For example, if you have a channel group that is defined in your custom grouping as "campaign contains shopping AND source == google," you can write that into the filters line of the optArgs call to the API.
This doesn't strike me as a sustainable, maintainable practice, however -- if the custom grouping is changed, you need to go back and change your code separately -- but it's the best solution available at the moment.

Answer 2

Example code is Javascript:
The filter doesn't seem to work for ga:channelGrouping, so 'filters':'ga:channelGrouping=Direct', fails with the error:
{
"error": {
"errors": [{
"domain": "global",
"reason": "invalidParameter",
"message": "Invalid value 'ga:channelGrouping=Direct' for filters parameter."
}],
"code": 400,
"message": "Invalid value 'ga:channelGrouping=Direct' for filters parameter."
}
}
But you can get the ga:channelGrouping back as a dimension:
gapi.client.analytics.data.ga.get({
'ids': 'ga:' + profileId,
'start-date': 'yesterday',
'end-date': 'today',
'dimensions':'ga:channelGrouping,ga:date, ga:landingPagePath, ga:pagePath',
'metrics': 'ga:entrances',
'sort': '-ga:date',
})
so you get it in the data:
[
/*Channel grouping*/
"(Other)",
"20150730",
"blah",
"vlah",
"7"
]
At the moment I'm planning on filtering the channel grouping in my own code once I get the result back rather than trying to get Google to do this for me. Basically because Google doesn't seem to support this right now...