Google Analytics Breakthrough

12 Implementation Customizations

It’s a recurring theme: customizations in Google Analytics (GA) beyond the default implementation facilitate better analysis and greater insights. We’ve already examined several key steps in surpassing default data collection and reporting: event and virtual pageviews to track non-pageview interactions, goal and Ecommerce configuration to track successes, campaign parameters to clarify acquisition, and view filters or segmentation to amplify trends within a data subset.

In this chapter, we consider some important additional customizations that will allow GA to more closely reflect our organizations and our customer experiences and thereby make the reporting even more comprehensive, meaningful, and actionable.

Custom Dimensions

As we first saw in Figure 4.7, GA records many dimensions with each hit, so we do not, for example, need to explicitly tell GA the visitor’s operating system or the title of the page viewed. This is certainly a benefit, but let’s consider a broader issue: by default, GA captures a certain number of predefined dimensions only. This default data set does not always provide the information that you need about your visitors, your organization, or your content.

By taking advantage of custom dimensions, you can extend the default GA data set to encompass dimensions that are specifically about your organization, your content, your products, or your customers.

The limit per property for custom dimensions—that is, the number ...