In Google Analytics, you can setup data configuration rules that determine how your data will be
processed. This includes implementing features like data filters, goals, data grouping, Custom Dimensions,
Custom Metrics, and imported data that can help you better define and analyze
the data in your reports.
As we discussed in Google Analytics for Beginners, you can set a filter on a view that can exclude
particular data, only include particular data, or modify the data during processing. This
helps you align the data that shows up in your reports with your business needs. Filters
are essentially “rules” that Google Analytics applies to the data during processing. If
the “filter type” is true, Google Analytics will apply the filter to the data. If the
filter type is false, Google Analytics won’t apply the filter.
There are two reasons you might want to apply filters. You may need to transform the data
that shows up in a view. For example, you might want to include only data from a particular
country in a view devoted to reporting on that country. Or you might want to exclude
any internal employee traffic from a view reporting on customer data.
The filters you choose to implement will depend on your specific measurement objectives, so
it’s important to plan what data you want to collect before you set up your filters.
We’ll discuss filters in more detail a little later.
There are four types of Goals in Google Analytics.
Destination (or Pageview) Goals are based on when a user views a particular page on
your website. Event Goals are when a particular action defined
as an event is triggered. These are the two most common types of Goals,
but you can also set up additional goals to measure user engagement:
Duration Goals are based on sessions that last over a set amount of time.
“Pages or Screens per Session” Goals are based on whether a user has viewed a set amount
of pages in a session. A conversion is counted once per session per
configured goal. So if you’ve defined an Event goal of downloading a PDF, and the
user downloads the PDF five times in the same session, this action will only count as one conversion.
During processing, when Analytics detects hit data for a goal, it calculates the goal
completions, goal value (if you’ve indicated one), and goal conversion rate, and includes
these in your reports.
Note that in Google Analytics, conversions and Ecommerce transactions are credited to
the last campaign, search, or ad that referred the user.
You may want to organize the data you collect in different ways than the standard Google
Analytics reports. Channel Groupings let you organize your data into customized channels, while
Content Grouping lets you aggregate metrics within reports based on the organization of
your website.
You learned about dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics for Beginners. But you also
can create your own dimensions and metrics in Analytics called “Custom Dimensions”
and “Custom Metrics.” Custom Dimensions help you define a group of metric data that’s
specific to your business and then apply that as a dimension across your reports.
Custom Dimensions can be used as a secondary dimension in standard reports, a primary dimension
in a Custom Report, or as a segment. We’ll discuss Custom Reports and segments later
in the course. “Custom Metrics” can be collected for
any standard dimension or Custom Dimension that can’t be measured by any predefined
metric in Google Analytics. You can also upload your own data to Google
Analytics including hit data, extended data that is stored in a Custom Dimension or Custom
Metric, and Summary data that lets you sum up any uploaded metrics. Typically, this information
is exported from an offline business tool like a content management system or customer
relationship management system into text files.
Data Import lets you combine this offline data to the hit data that Analytics collects
from your website. This will allow you to include your own business-specific data you
collected independently to give you more context and insight in your reports.
These are only a few of the features you can configure to help customize the data you collect
for your business. Note that you’ll need to set up these data configuration rules prior
to your data being processed. Once data has been processed, you can’t
retroactively apply configuration settings to that data. We’ll discuss how to set up
these configurations and use them for analysis a little later in the course.