Content Grouping: Intro to Google Analytics Newest Feature

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Finally, the day is upon us! A long awaited feature, Content Grouping, has at last rolled out to all Google Analytics accounts. The wait was well worth it as it supports a variety of ways to group content that could potentially save you significant time and resources, while still providing significant value to your analysis. Google Analytics has always been built on a foundation of capturing page URLs, which is the foundation of a lot of our analysis. One of the problems with this has been that the way that sites and URLs are structured may make perfect sense from a web design frame of mind, but they do not in many cases support the needs of analysts. Let’s dive into the feature that has changed this! 1. The Content Grouping settings is located in your Admin section here: Content-Grouping-Settings 2. Click 'Create New Content Grouping' here: Content-Grouping-Create 3. We are presented with three options for our content group. The amazing part is that you do not have to pick just one. Your grouping can use a combination of any of the three. Here are the three:
  • Rule Definitions
Content-Grouping-Rules
  • Extraction
Content-Grouping-Extractions
  • Tracking Code
Content-Grouping-Tracking Code  

If your site is well-structured you will likely use “Rule Definitions” for most of your groupings. Rule definitions are simple filters that isolate a subset of pages into the group that you define. If your site is well-structured and you are a regex wizard it is likely that “Extraction” will be much more useful for you. This can be more useful than “Rule Definitions” because your regex can define subcategories in a hierarchy-like structure. If your site is not well-structured, then you will need to rely on the “Tracking Code” method in which you will use code on your site to inform Google Analytics of the proper groupings.

This structure can come from your “Page,” “Page Title” or “Screen Name” dimensions. It is possible that even if your content is not structured well with URL's for your analysis that your page titles may be. Using these methods you should be able to group content to meet your requirements.

Here’s a base report that we will have access to upon creation. We can now easily see the trend for each group and all of their base metrics compared side by side with one another. In addition we can now drill into each group to see subpages if we need to perform additional analysis. Content-Grouping-Report That's it for our brief intro into how to create content groupings. I would love to hear from you of your use cases and thoughts about content grouping as you roll it out into your organization.