Use Custom Dimensions To Measure Performance With Google Analytics
Digital marketing should be data driven instead of technology driven. But data should be right and not simply accurate. It is learnt that Google Analytics isn’t used at its optimum level due to technical attitude towards this amazing tool. In this article, I will discuss custom dimensions and their value in data-driven marketing.
What are custom dimensions?
These are sources of non-standard data that is crucial for Google Analytics. The data can be segmented with standard data like medium and browser for making informed decisions. The custom dimension can also work as factors for isolating a specific group of audiences for deeper analysis.
If compared to content grouping, custom dimensions provide more useful information regarding hits, sessions, and users. Custom dimension can work perfectly with various levels of scope offered by Google Analytics. With custom dimensions, you can easily monitor the individual users and their interactions like visits and hits with your websites and even with web pages.
Let’s understand the use of custom dimension with an example. You run an e-commerce website with a blog that is part of your content marketing strategy. Now see how custom dimensions changes your perspective.
1. Visitor engagement
Your blog has a number of posts regarding the products available in the store and how to search products using various filters available on the site. The blog is doing well in organic search and also in social media but you aren’t able to highlight the monetary value of your efforts. You believe that user engagement with your blog results in purchases but you want to display the monetary value in Analytics. Here you can create a user-level custom dimension and configure it with Analytics. The dimension will check how many users are commenting on your blog posts and in this way help track behavior of the end users.
2. Demographics of visitors
Analytics show user login data as it is helpful in filtering loyal customers from visitors. But you can take it a step ahead by adding more tabs in the custom dimension. The objective is to draw more crucial data regarding the visitors. You can add a drop-down menu of occupations and ask the user to select his occupation from the menu. The data collected will help in determining the professions of users and their purchasing pattern.
3. Out-of-stock products
Every e-commerce site encounters the problem with pages of products that are out-of-stock. It is a problem because in SEO, you have to determine the status of every webpage. Customers would come to the pages that have no products and they will click back from the site never to come again. What you can do is leave the pages online use redirect on those pages or 404 them. Use a custom dimension to capture out-of-stock page views so that you can justify your action.
Conclusion
Create all the custom dimensions in Google Analytics Admin interface to add more data to the Analytics. Non-premium Google Analytics account users can add up to 20 custom dimensions to their Analytics. Data integrity is more important than any other feature but Google Analytics relies only on tracking codes. Even digital marketers overlook the importance of custom dimensions.
