- In this video you're gonna learn
how you can break through the limit
of 20 Custom Dimensions of the free version
of Google Analytics.
All and more coming up right after this.
(electronic music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video of measureschool.com
where we teach you the data driven way
of digital marketing.
My name is Julian and on this channel
we do marketing tech reviews, tutorials,
and give you tips for better tracking.
Just like this one.
So if you haven't yet, consider subscribing.
Now, Custom Dimensions are a really vital feature
for giving your data more context in Google Analytics.
Let's say you have a blog post and you want to send
information about who wrote that particular blog post
when it was published, or the word count of that blog post
to Google Analytics.
You can do all this with the help of Custom Dimensions.
Unfortunately, in the free version of Google Analytics
there are only 20 custom dimensions available
for you to fill.
Unless you are a Google Analytics 360 customer,
there's no way to getting around this limit,
or is there?
Here's a little trick you can use
to extend beyond the 20 Custom Dimensions.
Now, we've got lots to cover,
so let's dive in.
Today our journey starts at this demo shop
where we have a product and wanna send in
a Custom Dimension to Google Analytics.
That means we want to enrich
the data that we send anyways,
such as a page view to Google Analytics
with custom information that is not
automatically picked up by Google Analytics.
Now we have another video
on how to send in Custom Dimensions
via Google Tag Manager,
so if you wanna be able to do that
check out this video that we're gonna link up
in the description below.
But normally, in order to enrich the data
you would go over to Google Analytics
in the admin section
and go under the Custom Definitions here
and Custom Dimensions.
And here is where you would input
a new Custom Dimension to be able to send it over
to Google Analytics.
Now the restriction here is
that you only have 20 Custom Dimensions to your disposal.
But this feature is used quite often,
and if you think that it is currently underutilized
in your account,
then go over to the blog post of the next web
where the guys in the marketing department
have given us some examples
of 50 Custom Dimensions that they send over
into their Google Analytics premium account.
So at some point you might run out of Custom Dimensions
within your Google Analytics account
and want to extend it beyond 20 Custom Dimensions.
This is only possible by buying a license
for the Google Analytics 360 product.
So I want to show you a little trick
in order to send in custom information
outside of this Custom Dimension specification.
How would you do that?
Well, now on this website I wanna show you
what data actually gets sent over to Google Analytics
when our tracking script is executed.
We can see that with the GA Debugger extension enabled
and going into our Javascript console,
which we can see here in the developer tools.
We have our Javascript console,
and we can see here what data gets sent over
to Google Analytics.
Let's re-load this.
And the most important information,
probably, the pageview that gets sent.
And we have a host of other dimensions
that are attached to this data point,
to this metric.
So for example, we have the page URL,
the Client ID,
the title of this page.
Or maybe also some information
that is less used in you account.
Such as the apiVersion, the adSenseId,
the screenResolution, or the viewportSize.
So let's go with our example here,
flashVersion, do you actually use that in your reports?
Which means do you go into Google Analytics
and look into your page report, for example,
and drill down here on Secondary Dimension, Flash Version?
Probably not.
Unless you have Flash running on your page
and want to debug this option,
it might be useful to look at.
But in most cases,
it's unnecessary to send over with the hit.
Now, we can utilize this slot of Flash Version
that gets sent by default to manipulate it
and send in our custom data information.
How is this possible?
Well, first of all, let's look at
our Analytics JS Field Reference.
This is where all our fields that are
send over to Google Analytics are documented,
and what value they need to hold,
or what restrictions they have.
So we can look here for our Flash Version,
and here we find the field.
Now, this field takes a text property
with a maximum length of 20 bytes,
and is filled with this Example value.
Now, when our Google Analytics code executes,
we could overwrite this field
in order to send our custom information
over to Google Analytics,
and make it visible under the dimension of Flash Version
in our interface.
And this is a handy trick to get around
the 20 dimensions limit.
So how would we do that?
Well if you are working with Google Tag Manager,
it's actually pretty easy.
Let's say on this page we want to pick up
custom data layer information.
Let's first of all make the data layer visible
by going into our Preview and Debug mode,
and we see here that we have a data layer
that has some custom information in here.
This is something you need to get your developer
to implement custom on your page,
or use a plug-in, like we did on this wordpress website,
and we see some interesting information
that we might want to send over
as a Custom Dimension into Google Analytics.
So, for example, here we have a pagePostDate
that I wanna send into Google Analytics
in order to compare our page use
by when they were published.
This is, for example, important for blog posts.
So, let's first of all pull this value
out of the data layer.
This can be done with the Data Layer Variable.
So let's go over to Variables here,
and click on New,
and we'll build a data layer variable
for the pagePostDate.
The configurations will be a Data Layer Variable,
and we need to copy the key here,
so pagePostDate into our Data Layer Variable Name.
Then save this,
and we should now have it available.
Let's refresh this.
Here are our variables,
and we should see our data layer pagePostDate
with the date when this was published.
So this is now something I wanted to send in
with our Google Analytics pageview Tag.
How can we do this?
Let's go back to our Google Tag Manager,
under Tags,
we have already a Google Analytics pageview tag.
This is something we're gonna modify.
Now, normally, we would set a Custom Dimension here,
enter our Index and our Dimension Value.
But if they are all filled up,
we can use this handy trick,
our Fields to Set option here,
and use our flashVersion.
This is in this list,
or we can just enter it,
flashVersion,
with our value here.
Let's fill this dynamically
with our Data Layer Variable pagePostDate.
That should do it.
Let's save this.
Refresh our Preview and Debug mode.
Refresh our page.
And we see our Google Analytics pageview tag fired,
and configurations,
have the flashVersion June 7th, 2013.
Let's check that back in our GA Debugger
by opening up our developer tools,
and this time we see that the flashVersion
was dynamically filled with our post date.
So we have actually overwritten our flashVersion field
with Custom Data Layer information.
That will show up in our reports, of course,
and under flashVersion Custom Dimension.
I have prepared something here
just to show you,
it will take a while once you send it in,
but as we can see,
it will then be automatically filled
with the pagePostDate that you filled in
to the flashVersion field,
and that's how you can utilize
the flashVersion dimension
as a Custom Dimension field
without using up one of the slots
of the Custom Dimensions within your account.
Now, the obvious downside of this is
that you cannot really control the scope of this.
So, the flashVersion field in this case
is hit scoped and it will be applied
to every page you or every event
that is sent to Google Analytics.
So I hope you find this tip helpful.
Don't forget in the end to publish this
to a Version live to all your users.
(electronic music)
So there you have it.
This is how you can utilize unused dimensions
to enrich your data beyond the 20 Custom Dimensions
of your free Google Analytics account.
Did you find this useful?
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
And as always, if you like this video,
please go ahead and hit that like button.
Share it to a friend,
and subscribe to this channel
to get more of these videos every Wednesday.
My name is Julian,
till next time.