The Best Regex Weapon for Google Analytics
The honest truth about Google Analytics: hardly any novice-to-intermediate user ever uses custom reports, dashboards, or alerts. The good news is that you can do A LOT with the standard reports if you know a couple of handy tricks at your disposal.
Current World of Google Analytics Data Search
I am sure you have seen the above. The field where you can find something specific. It's pretty handy, but it's also fairly limiting. You can click into it and get this little guy.
Advanced Google Analytics Data Search
When clicking on advanced, you can include/exclude by the dimensions you have and utilize simple operators such as "containing", "begins with", "ends with", and "exactly matching" which in reality we all rarely use (it's tough remembering what dimensions are exactly named!). This is great when trying to find a set of pages, or campaigns etc. that need to be grouped together for easy review of how things are going. But it is a little difficult at doing things that require you to look at data that has some type of value OR another type of value OR....and the list goes on. You are basically stuck using these rules to potentially do one-off reports and going back into it to get the other types. This is where the "Matching RegExp" comes in.
What is Regex?
Wikipedia's definition of regex, or regular expressions, is "a sequence of characters that define a search pattern". Regex plays a huge role in data mining, computational mathematics, and data processing, but for novice digital analyst or the person who's trying to get the most out of Google Analytics, I want to push the "easy button" for you and eliminate redundant tasks for you.
The Pipe Delimiter (|)
Remember that use case I discussed where I asked you about being able to look at values that something OR something else? The pipe delimiter allows you to do that. Easily put, the pipe delimiter basically is the OR in a statement of data. It's a way to get not directly related data to show up in a report for you.
Think about the Paid/Owned/Earned (POE) model for a second. You might have several different forms of paid advertising going on such as Paid Search, Display, Affiliate marketing. With the current contains, or other rules, it would be hard to separate that out easily. Below is some dummy data of a current view of the default channels category report.
If you are going to get this to look at a subset of this easily, use the pipe delimiter with the "matching regexp" setting in the advanced search. It looks like this:
"paid|display|affiliate"
What I basically am saying is "something that contains the word paid OR display OR affiliate. Here's how it looks in the advanced search box:
Pretty easy right? Here's the output after I apply this to the report:
You see in the top right-hand corner that you have the "Advanced Filter On" and it has returned only the three categories we were interested in for quick and easy reporting on your paid activities for your model.
Conclusion
Seriously, the pipe delimiter will change the way you utilize analytics greatly. It gives you an easy way to get not-related data to show up in a report for you so you can report quickly. It opens you up to eliminate doing a lot of excel you might not need to and just keep it in analytics for a more nimble approach. And, if you aren't even using the advanced search in Google Analytics, start there because it will make so much more agile in the tool.
Now for you - think of the data that you need more ready at your fingertips that can be analyzed more easily using the advanced search and the pipe and get to work!
Current World of Google Analytics Data Search
Advanced Google Analytics Data Search
When clicking on advanced, you can include/exclude by the dimensions you have and utilize simple operators such as "containing", "begins with", "ends with", and "exactly matching" which in reality we all rarely use (it's tough remembering what dimensions are exactly named!). This is great when trying to find a set of pages, or campaigns etc. that need to be grouped together for easy review of how things are going. But it is a little difficult at doing things that require you to look at data that has some type of value OR another type of value OR....and the list goes on. You are basically stuck using these rules to potentially do one-off reports and going back into it to get the other types. This is where the "Matching RegExp" comes in.
What is Regex?
Wikipedia's definition of regex, or regular expressions, is "a sequence of characters that define a search pattern". Regex plays a huge role in data mining, computational mathematics, and data processing, but for novice digital analyst or the person who's trying to get the most out of Google Analytics, I want to push the "easy button" for you and eliminate redundant tasks for you.
The Pipe Delimiter (|)
Remember that use case I discussed where I asked you about being able to look at values that something OR something else? The pipe delimiter allows you to do that. Easily put, the pipe delimiter basically is the OR in a statement of data. It's a way to get not directly related data to show up in a report for you.
Think about the Paid/Owned/Earned (POE) model for a second. You might have several different forms of paid advertising going on such as Paid Search, Display, Affiliate marketing. With the current contains, or other rules, it would be hard to separate that out easily. Below is some dummy data of a current view of the default channels category report.
If you are going to get this to look at a subset of this easily, use the pipe delimiter with the "matching regexp" setting in the advanced search. It looks like this:
"paid|display|affiliate"
What I basically am saying is "something that contains the word paid OR display OR affiliate. Here's how it looks in the advanced search box:
Pretty easy right? Here's the output after I apply this to the report:
You see in the top right-hand corner that you have the "Advanced Filter On" and it has returned only the three categories we were interested in for quick and easy reporting on your paid activities for your model.
Conclusion
Seriously, the pipe delimiter will change the way you utilize analytics greatly. It gives you an easy way to get not-related data to show up in a report for you so you can report quickly. It opens you up to eliminate doing a lot of excel you might not need to and just keep it in analytics for a more nimble approach. And, if you aren't even using the advanced search in Google Analytics, start there because it will make so much more agile in the tool.
Now for you - think of the data that you need more ready at your fingertips that can be analyzed more easily using the advanced search and the pipe and get to work!
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