Now let's talk about one chore that we still need to take care of which is
content and channel grouping. And it's pretty straightforward we just need to
configure it in our Google Analytics admin section. So just to show you what
content groupings are all about. If you go into the reporting you have content
groupings enabled then you will be able under the behavior report and under the
content report we have here all pages we are able to group the different content
pieces that we have on our side up here with content grouping. And there's a
default content grouping here which is called none and we have put in place
some different content groups for example the home page, the product pages,
the landing pages, the member only pages. And it really is up
to the business that we're working with how we would put them in place. And this
really gives us the opportunity to analyze certain groups of sites in one
place. So for example here with members only content group we can see the
different products and what people are logged into and what they use mostly so
this really makes sense to put in place. So back in our demo account in the admin
section, you will be able to find this kind of content groupings under the view
settings and here we are with the point content grouping. And when we click on it
we can set up a new group and you can give it a name, so let's just call the
Sitewide and you can here put it in the certain rules to classify the content.
Now it's possible to do that by a tracking code by adding something to the
tracking code. This is really useful if you really can't classify it by any URL
structure or page title. And this is really easily done with Google tag
manager too. So it's worth looking into it if you want to set up a little bit
more sophisticated kind of content grouping. We have groups using
extraction which is basically the page path, or you can also use the page title,
or the screen name. It's really refers to a regular expression here you need to
put in a regular expression here or you can choose the user-defined rules which
is a little bit more granular with page and page title. But here you can choose
the different match types such as exactly matches or contains or ends with
or starts with and so on. So in the example from our demo shop when we go over
to our demo shop, it would be good to filter maybe the home page. So this would
exactly matches. A slash
and we call this the home page.
And then we want to create another rule with maybe let's say all the product
pages. And we see here that they include product so we can classify that here
product pages. And the page contains/product session so that will be in
there. And that's just for the fun of it put in the cart for example. So this is
obviously the cart so I just put this into a rule. And once we save this and
data comes in, you need to actually cancel this and save it.
Then we will be able to see that in our content reports so on the all pages we
should now see the content grouping and we have here the sitewide content
groups. And they are not set because the data again from anything that you
configure in the view is only processed once you put it actually in place and
it's not retroactive. So the other thing that need we need to configure is the
channel grouping and you have a channel report on the acquisition all traffic
and channels. And those channels are the find by rules so you have email, paid
search, direct. And those are basically the default channels that are already
configured. But you might want to put some configuration in place if there's a
special channel like affiliate for example that Google Analytics can't
really distinguish through their default channel grouping. So if you go on other
right here and we find for example Twitter which is important for us or
active campaign should really be in the email column then we can modify the
rules here to put it in the right channel. And the channels are available
throughout different reports so it's really important to configure them
correctly. So back in our admin section we can find the channel settings and the
view again here. There are also other channel settings down here which are
under personal tools and assets. So they will only be available for your account
but not for somebody who is logged in with their account. So this is something
personal that you can configure but we want to do it sitewide and we want to
have it affect the processing so we'll click here on channel settings. And here
comes up that we have channel groupings and brand terms. First of all the channel
groupings already configured there is a default channel grouping in place. You
can click on that and define new channels and new rules here.
And this really depends on your website, so for example if you want to put in
place a channel called affiliate then we need to filter it down by some kind of
medium or some kind of dimension here. So for example the medium would always
contain affiliate, we could put this in place and it will be put into the right
group. Obviously this really depends on the next section that we'll go through
how you tag your traffic with UTM parameters. And this will be discussed in
the next section. And once you have put this in place you just click on save and
you're set and done. And this is pretty customized to the business and their
traffic sources. But be aware that if you don't put something in place right away
it won't show up in the data and it's not retroactively once you put it in. So
I would strongly encourage you to find out what would be the traffic sources
and if there anything out of the ordinary put them in place right away
with the right rule. And one thing we don't want to miss is also under the
channel settings the brand terms. So once we click on this we can enter brand
terms. Now why is this important if you do anything on Adwords or search engine
optimization wise you know that the search queries for a brand term should
be treated separately and we can also do this in Google Analytics. So for example
for our demo show up here, demo shop would certainly be a brand term or we
put in demo shop and we can add these brand terms, so now they are actively in
the brand term section here. If you have AdWords running, Google Analytics will
also pick up on suggested brand terms that you can add but once you click on
save it will actually ask you if you want to set up a channel for these brand
terms. And once you click on yes you see up here the new two
new system-generated channels which is generic paid search and branded paid
search. So it will distinguish between the brand terms and non brand terms. You
could also set this up manually for organic search traffic. If we click on
page search for example we see the rule that the query type matches brand and
you can do the same for organic search traffic by defining a new rule. So your
organic search traffic also gets gets to be put into these categories. Although
with the recent changes to Google not revealing the search term anymore and
most of the search terms are now not provided it might be less useful. But
nonetheless if you are on the path to doing this anyways here in the channel
definitions I would encourage you to set that up as well.