I’m in the process of creating a handful of custom dashboards in Google Analytics to highlight data that matters to me for State Supply. Channel Groupings are an important dimension that I track in Google Analytics. Specifically, I am interested in the number of sessions by channel, the average session duration by channel and the average page views per session by channel.
State Supply drives a decent amount of traffic from the repair videos we post to YouTube. While traffic to statesupply.com from YouTube does not mint money for the company, the engagement metrics are incredible. A user who comes to statesupply.com from YouTube has an average session duration that is 5x higher than any other traffic source. The problem is that I was not seeing those numbers reflected in our Social channel grouping. So, the information on my aforementioned custom dashboards was wrong for the channel groupings metrics.
After doing a bit of research I came upon documentation on how Google segments traffic sources in to channel groupings. Eureka! The problem was that when building tracking URL’s, I was giving all YouTube videos a Campaign Medium of “video”, ie: utm_medium=video
. This seemed logical to me, as the users visiting statesupply.com through a YouTube were acquired by a video. Alas, per the documentation, the Social channel in Google Analytics does not consider a campaign medium of “video” to be within the social context (which is also logical).
So, there were two apparent ways to solve my Google Analytics conundrum.
- Change all links from
utm_medium=video
toutm_medium=social
- Update the Channel Settings for the Google Analytics View.
Option 1 felt wrong. Even though I wanted to see the data for YouTube in the Social channel grouping, the medium in which the content is delivered is still video. In addition, it would be a lot of work to update the campaign medium for the dozens of links current tagged utm_medium=video
. So, option 2 was the clear winner for me.
Updating the rules that govern channel groupings in Google Analytics is simple.
-
Login to Google Analytics and go to the Admin Section.
-
Go to the specific View that you need to update channel settings for and click Channel Grouping.
Channel Settings -
Within the View’s channel settings, click Default Channel Grouping.
Channel Grouping List -
Within the Default Channel Grouping settings, add the proper rule to the Social channel grouping.
FWIW, I realize the “Add Traffic Medium to Channel Grouping in Google Analytics” would be a more appropriate title for this post as source != medium. But I am weird and my brain is on vacation today.
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