2 Unusual Content Groups

We’ve been spoiled with all Google Analytics (GA) features released this year. At L3, we’re particularly keen on Content Grouping. After playing around with this toy for a while, I’d like to share a small tip about it.

As a reminder, the aim of this feature is to categorise your content. It’s incredibly useful and I recommend everyone to set up their content grouping (see this guide from Justin Cutroni for more information).

It is an unsaid thing but we can also take advantage of this to capture additional information – whether it aims to categorise your content or not. For instance, there are two content groups we find so useful we tend to implement them to all clients: the URL being viewed and the referrer of the current page.

Why should I capture this information?

The first reason is that it’s stupidly easy to set up with a Tag Management system (TMS) as Google Tag Manager (GMT):

Then, it can literately save your hide to identify unknown tracking issues. For instance, if you are smart enough to improve your page naming convention, it can be used to check which URLs are being viewed for each page.

Hence, even if you rename pages, you can still easily access the URL of the page. You just need go to your page report, click on the page to check and apply a secondary dimension:

Likewise, you can use the URL Landing Content Group to check which query parameters were on your destination URLs. I particularly like this report because I can quickly spot if there is anything wrong in the campaign tracking.

For this, you can simply go to your landing page report, change the primary dimension and use the search box to filter all pages containing a question mark:

The referrer content group allows us to see which URLs were viewed before a specific page. For instance, it can be very handy to analyse which URLs lead to a 404 page:

Why capturing this information as a content group?

People may wonder why I don’t use 1 of the 20 available custom dimensions to capture this information instead…

The key reason is that I find more handy to have this set up as a Content Grouping. For instance, it can be used as a Primary dimension in the ‘All Pages’ and ‘Landing Pages’ reports whereas custom dimensions are only available as a Secondary Dimension:

Then, I can use a secondary dimension to check the previous, next or entry URL :

(note that I can also use the ‘Navigation Summary’ report as the URL level with this content grouping)

Following that, I prefer using Content Grouping to capture some information available across all pages of a website. For instance, the author name or the product category can only be captured on specific pages – I’d rather use here a custom dimension to avoid seeing ‘(not set)’ in my content group reports.

In the end, I record most of the page-level information I need as custom dimensions. Hence, the 5 available Content Grouping slots are more than enough for me and I’m happy to add those 2 unusual content groups to make my life easier.