What are custom dimensions in Google Analytics?

Custom Dimensions in Google Analytics

By default, Google Analytics allows you to segment traffic by standard dimensions such as visitor location, screen size, or traffic source. You can view smarter reports by adding custom dimensions specific for your business.

Give me an example

Let’s say when your members register they add a job title. Would you like to see reports on the site activity for a particular job title, or compare conversion for one job title versus another? In which case you would set a custom dimension of ‘Job Title’ and then be able to filter by just the ‘Researchers’ for any Google Analytics report.
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Or if you run a blog / content site, you could have a dimension of ‘author’ and see all the traffic and referrals that a particular author on your site gets.

How do I set this up?

First, you need to be on Universal Analytics, and then you need to tag each page with one or more custom dimensions for Google Analytics. This is more easily done with Google Tag Manager and a data layer.

It may be that the information is already on the web page (like the author of this post), but in many cases, your developer will need to include it in the background in a way that can be posted to Google Analytics.

Then you will need to set up a custom report to split a certain metric (like page views) by the custom dimension (e.g. author).

Please contact our specialists if you want more advice on how to set up custom dimensions!

 

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