Every report in Google Analytics contains dimensions and metrics. Dimensions describe the data, and metrics measure them. Custom metrics let you measure additional items beyond the default measurements like "sessions" and "total events". It's easy to overlook them because it's often possible to get similar results in other ways (e.g. events + goals), but custom ... Read more
Using regex to match specific numbers of sub-directories in a URL can be very helpful for Google Analytics. When I configure a new Google Analytics view, I'll usually set up Content Grouping so we can see traffic by page type rather than just to a specific page. Ideally there's a value in the data layer ... Read more
This post addresses whether it's better to use a single Tag Manager container for a website, or to create different containers for different sections of the site. For smaller companies, it may be obvious that a single container should serve the entire company, but for large companies with multiple business owners and site sections, it ... Read more
This blog post walks through the process of adding a jQuery function to a custom HTML tag in Google Tag Manager in order to populate tags with text or other information available on the page. While Google Tag Manager (GTM) has many useful built-in features for targeting certain areas of the page for event tracking, sometimes ... Read more
Depending on your site setup, a user may navigate between multiple subdomains while on your site. For example, they may start with blog.xyz.com, then go to www.xyz.com, and so on. Google Analytics has a Hostname (subdomain) report located at Audience > Technology > Network > select the Hostname tab. In this report, the sum of ... Read more
If you're interested in excluding dynamic IP addresses, I suggest following the steps in this article. However, if you want something faster or less involved, this article contains 2 super easy methods to exclude your own internal traffic from Google Analytics when you have a dynamic IP address or are using your mobile data network. ... Read more
CSS selectors are one of the most flexible methods for creating triggers in Google Tag Manager. You can usually view the CSS selector for an element by opening the developer console (F12 on Windows/Linux or option + ⌘ + J on OSX) and clicking the inspect elements icon, or just hovering over the element and right-clicking Inspect. In some cases, however, this method ... Read more
Misunderstood Metrics #3: Direct Traffic (or how someone did not actually type in a URL 280 characters long) Here’s a question I got that represents much of the confusion around direct traffic. In my direct traffic report I’m seeing many deep page links receiving visits from direct traffic. I heard that people bookmarking the page and ... Read more
Misunderstood Metrics #4: Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate This post explains the difference between two misunderstood metrics: bounce rate and exit rate. Both of these metrics are used to understand how people are using your site, but bounce rate broadly indicates how well your site meets viewer expectations, while exit rate shows what pages were ... Read more
Misunderstood Metrics #2: Sessions Per Page Sessions are a standard metric throughout Google Analytics. But one place you don’t see them is in the Content > Pages report. Here, instead, you’ll see Pageviews and Unique Pageviews. Many enterprising users therefore try to get around this by creating their own custom report containing Page as ... Read more
