What is the proper way to tag pages in Google Analytics?

user_14479888 0
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I don't even know if "tagging pages" is what I mean.

Essentially, I have a large education website with many types of pages. Specifically, I want to tag our program pages by faculty, level, etc. For example, the Biology program page would be tagged with Science (as its faculty), and Undergraduate (as its level). It's possible that a program could belong to multiple faculties and/or levels (Psychology, for instance, is both a Science program and an Arts program). There is nothing in the URL to signify faculty or level. The website is built in Drupal, in case you know of any modules that could facilitate this.

I want to understand how different faculties/levels/etc perform. I will be building reports in Google Data Studio.

Any guidance would be appreciated!

google-analytics
2 Answers

What you are looking for is called 'content grouping'. If you haven't information in the URL you can define some rules when the page loads and pass the information to Analytics with the pageviews.

You can find more information here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2853423?hl=en

Then you can get these information from Data Studio.

user_56402000

Because of your multi-value needs, nothing in GA is going to satisfy your requirements out of the box. You will have to do some post-processing, and I am not familiar enough with Data Studio to know where its limits are in that regard.

As the previous poster suggested, Content Grouping is the standard way to create custom aggregations of pages. You can have multiple content groupings, such as Faculty and Level, but a page can be in only one group per grouping (not the clearest terminology but it appears to be what Google uses).

A different option is Custom Dimensions. There are two options here. One is to create custom dimensions for Level and Faculty. Each page can still have only one value per dimension, but you could send a comma-delimited string when a department is in multiple faculties (for instance) and then pull it apart again in a spreadsheet.

The second option is to create a custom dimension for Department directly, and associate each department to the appropriate one or more faculties and levels in your reporting.

How you set the custom dimensions or content grouping will depend on your implementation of GA. If you are using the Google Analytics Drupal module, it says it supports setting custom dimensions as a feature. If you are using Google Tag Manager you can set the dimension value in your tags directly, though of course it will need to decide what value to set on based on either totally enumerated rules you write or something it can read out of the page. Here is some Tag Manager documentation: Content Grouping via GTM; Custom Dimensions via GTM.

If the department is present in the page in some consistently marked-up way you can grab it; if not the Metatag module or one of its schema.org extensions might be able to provide you a spot to set a value for GTM to retrieve.

user_37085200
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