What is Google Analytics? and Google Analytics User Guide

Custom metrics are one of the most used features in Google Analytics. This blog post will help you improve your setup and your skills with custom metrics.

In a previous blog post, I provided information about predefined measurements and calculated measurements.

Of course, both sets of metrics are incredibly powerful, but many extra optimization opportunities will open up when you define custom metrics that make sense for your business.

In the Google Demo Store, there is only one custom metric configured. In our blog post I will take this to a whole new level and explain in depth about custom metrics based on a real use case.

And the good news is that you can replicate this method in your Google Analytics account!

Introduction to Custom Metrics
Measurement plan
Activity Monitoring App
Solution Specific Metrics
From Custom Metrics to Calculated Metrics
Creating Custom Reports
Analysis and Optimization
Conclusion and Reflections

Introduction to Custom Metrics

Both custom dimensions and custom metrics can greatly improve your Google Analytics data.

Similar to custom dimensions, custom measurements can have different scopes.

Hit-level custom metrics: associated with all hit-level dimensions to which it is sent.
Custom measurements at product level: only associated with the product to which it is sent. If you want to take advantage of this feature, you need to have an advanced e-commerce system.

In the rest of this post, I’ll share the process behind it and an example for a specific metric for the hit.

Measurement plan

Now let’s take a step back!

Before you consider taking advantage of any Google Analytics feature, you should clarify your measurement plan and goals.

You can evaluate any organization from a strategic and tactical perspective. This is also how the measurement plan works.

(Strategic) Business Objectives> Goals> Objectives> KPIs> Targets> Segments (Tactical)

Activity Monitoring App

The first step in this section is to create event tracking for the reception method.

Trigger event tracking in these two cases:

When it appears modal, as a non-interactive event.
When someone successfully submits the form, as an interactive event.

A simplified version of both events is shown below:

Set a non-interactive event for the “modal view” (to avoid messing with your bounce rate statistics
Use the “Modal version” event tag or other properties that are important to you.
As always, make sure you use the appropriate naming conventions for your GTM installation.

Event Monitoring Data

This is what the activity monitoring data looks like:

By filtering the right event here:

Setting “Event Category” as primary and “Event Action” as secondary.
Apply a table filter to both the dimensions and the required values.

As expected, the Total Event count is only slightly different from the Unique Event count.

So far so good, the data is coming in correctly.

Event Monitoring

Event tracking is a great start, but in a situation like this it is far from being the solution for us. There is no way to include this metric in Google Analytics, which relies on activity tracking alone.

Also, it is very difficult to match activity tracking statistics across every dimension in Google Analytics, and this is something we already want to optimize the model in many different ways.

Solution Specific Metrics

In this case, special measurements will be your best friend. In the free version of Google Analytics you can set up to 20 custom metrics per feature.

In GA 360 you can set 200 custom measurements per feature. Custom measurements are applied in a similar way to Custom Dimensions.

Here are four important steps to take:

Planning
Configuration
Application
Processing

1- Planning

In the first phase, you should plan which specific metrics need to be implemented to improve your data and insights.

In this case we will apply two specific measures:

A special metric that increases one by one with each manifestation of Modal.
Custom metric method that increments once every time the user submits the Modal registration form.

2. Configuration

Now we can go to the next step and configure custom metrics in Google Analytics.

Go to: Property > Custom Definitions > Custom Metrics (Property > Custom Definitions > Custom Metrics.)

You can see all information about these special measurements here:

Name according to naming conventions to ensure that everyone can easily recognize and use custom metrics.
Special metrics measure accurately.
The format type is an integer.
The index fields used need to be linked to actual practice.
If necessary, specify a minimum and/or maximum value. We will then set a fixed custom measurement value so that this is not necessary.

Example:

“You can set minimum and maximum values that determine whether Analytics processes this metric and includes it in your reports. This can help prevent accidentally summing large or small values and affecting your reporting. If we don’t want our range to exceed 1, we can set the minimum to 0 and the maximum to 2. ”

3.Application

We come to this area because the required custom metrics are defined and configured in Google Analytics.

You can apply custom metrics coded into your site, but Google Tag Manager is the more preferred solution.

The best part is that you just need to tweak the pre-existing event tracking tags to make it work.

Here you can see how and where you need to change the labels.

Special Metric - Modal View

Custom Metric - Modal Subscription

Match the index number with the configuration in Google Analytics.
Add a fixed value of “1” to ensure that a metric increment with each value/event is sent to Google Analytics.

4. Processing

In Google Analytics, custom metrics can take up to 24 hours to reflect.

There are several ways to check, the one created in the table below is a quick and custom report.

You can add custom metrics to any custom report (making it incredibly powerful).
You can divide into one or more predefined and/or custom sized sections.
Numbers on Modal Aspect (1% of difference <):
- 18,922 = Modal View custom metric.
- 18,959 = Modal View total events.

From Custom Metrics to Calculated Metrics

Finally, we have reached the final step to get the measurement suitable for the process we want!

The feature of calculated metrics is that they are very powerful as they allow you to create KPIs (not core metrics) that best fit your business goals.

“Calculated Metrics are calculated from existing metrics, perform closer analysis, and are user-defined metrics that allow for more action without leaving the product.”

The available metrics belong to predefined (or default) metrics, but custom metrics can also be set!

You can see the screenshot below, this is quite easy to set up. As soon as you start typing in the “Formula” field, you will receive suggestions for the “Formula”.

If you want to learn more about this feature, also read my previous post on calculated metrics. You can define five calculated measurements for each view.

Creating Custom Reports

Let’s go into a little more detail about creating custom reports.

You can use this new data to create various reports inside and outside Google Analytics.

A few suggestions:

Create custom reports in Google Analytics and share them with your team members.
Use these new metrics in dashboards in Google Data Studio.
Move your data to Google Sheets for advanced data analysis.

Here you can see that all metrics are available:

Analysis and Optimization

At this stage, you should have already defined your most important and secondary business questions.

“What is it that you are trying to solve or improve?”

A quick example of the use case.

“You believe that the Modal Conversion Rate in Europe has been falling since the start of the GDP. You would like to analyze Modal Efficiency more on a country-by-country basis. “

To answer this business question, I will create a special report with several measures and dimensions.

Metrics

Modal View (custom metric)
Persistent Subscribers (custom metric)
Permanent Conversion Rate (calculated metric)

Dimensions

Continent
Country (accessible by drilling down from general)

Filter

Continent = Europe

Custom Report Setup

Special Report Data

The Modal Conversion Rate metric comes out as 11/202 = 0.0545 (!).
You need to have enough data before and after May 25th to make a good analysis.
Create a Google Analytics segment to include only EU countries affected by GDPR.

Conclusion and Reflections

I hope we can agree that custom metrics are powerful for your business. It’s all about getting your measurement plan right and defining the most important business objectives up front.

Then you need to make sure that your Google Analytics implementation supports you to get the information you need.

My final comments on custom metrics:

Best practice is to create custom metrics for the most important interactions and activities on your website.
Then, for optimization purposes, you can cut them into sections with your most important dimensions.
Use them to set up A/B tests and analyze them in Google Analytics or create horizontal pyramids.

If you haven’t started yet, start taking special measurements now. And don’t forget to share with us if it helped you to improve your KPIs properly!

Google Analytics User Guide

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