- 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 in this video I'm gonna show you
how you can utilize
the new calculated metrics feature
of Google Analytics
to enhance your data.
I go through some examples,
how to set them up exactly,
and give you a collection
of my used calculated metrics.
All and more coming up,
so let's start in.
(lively electronic music)
- Now calculated metrics have been
a quite new feature in GA
for just some months now.
There have been some great use cases
which I will link up
in the description below
so you can check them out.
But if you are new to them,
let's start at the beginning.
What are calculated metrics?
To understand what calculated metrics are,
we want to first look
at our content report here
under All Pages,
where
we can quickly recap
what metrics are.
Because we see metrics here here as numbers
on the right side
and dimensions
on the left side.
So that's the difference
between metrics
and dimensions.
Metrics are
single data points
that you can count up.
So for example the Pageviews are counted up
to
a total number of Pageviews
on our site.
And dimensions,
which we see here
on the left side,
are
actual properties
that describe the Pageview.
In this case
which page
was the user
on when he generated this Pageview.
So the basic
data point here is the Pageview.
We have different other metrics
which are mostly calculated metrics,
and which combine one
or the other data points
with each other
to describe a relationship.
So for example the bounce rate
is
one of these metrics
that is calculated
and
it's defined as the percentage
of single page visits.
So Google Analytics looks at the session,
basically finds out if there was
only one Pageview
in that session,
and calculates how many Pageviews
of this page only had
this single view
in the session.
So Google Analytics already
calculates a lot of metrics
in our reports,
and now they give us the ability
to calculate our own metrics.
So how can you build custom metrics?
Well if you go up here into our Admin section,
We
find
under the View options
the new
calculated metrics option
which we can click
and add new calculated metrics.
Now let's start out
with a little example.
If you go to our Reporting,
we know that we can see
the pages per sessions
that is a common calculated metrics
within Google Analytics.
But we actually also have the availability
of the actual Users.
So how would this metric look like
if we had Pages per User?
And this is something we can implement
with calculated metrics.
So let's go ahead
and click on new calculated metric.
You give your metric a name,
which you will be also able to query
via the Reporting API.
And then we have different formatting types,
in our case Float will be fine.
And now we can start implementing a formula.
And you can simply start typing,
so in our case Pageviews.
And you can use,
like in Excel,
your normal operators,
in our case divided by.
And we want to divide this
by Users.
And that way we can
create our new custom metric.
And this actually works retroactively.
So we can
change this calculated metric
and Google Analytics will go back
and reprocess the data.
Now how can you see actual calculated metrics?
Well they are available
in dashboards
or widgets,
but most of the times you would probably
build your own Custom Report
by going into the Customization option
and building a new
report.
Or you can actually choose your metric.
And in our case there was Pages per User,
which we have just defined.
Click on this
and let's divide this
by the source medium.
Let's save this report.
And we see
our different source mediums
and the Pages per User
that came through a given source.
So this is how you can easily
use your calculated metrics
in order to enhance your reports.
Now with calculated metrics,
it's obvious that we go very deep
into the customization
of Google Analytics
towards your business needs
or your website.
Not all calculated metrics will make sense
for your business
or your clients' websites.
But we made up this little document
with different examples
of custom calculated metrics
that you can use
and decide for yourself if this is something
that you want to implement.
And you can download this little document,
which we will also update,
at measureschool.com/calculatedmetrics.
(lively electronic music)
- And that's already it
with this week's video
of measureschool.com.
If you have any questions please leave them
in the comments below.
And if you like this video subscribe
to our channel
so we can bring you the newest developments
in digital measurement every week.
My name is Julian.
Till next time.
(lively electronic music)