Analytics for Marketers

Custom Variables in Google Analytics

18th June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments

Google Analytics tracks a lot of data about the structure of your website and how your users interact with it, but (thankfully) it can’t know everything. If there is some data you want Google Analytics to know about your users that it doesn’t collect by default you should be using Custom Variables. In this article we try to demystify Custom Variables, discuss a few clever uses of the feature, and then provide lots of links for you to learn more.

When to use Custom Variables

Consider Customer Variables an empty box your users carry around with them during their visit on your site. That box can be filled with page specific data, session specific data, or even follow them around when they come back for a second visit. For sure, Custom Variables are considered an advanced feature of Analytics but they actually aren’t as advanced as most people make them out to be.

Using them is as easy as calling a method within your HTML that contains the category name you want to track, the value, and the scope of the variables. Say we’re running an online newspaper that wants to measure which content sections its users are interested in. One possible category might be Section where we store variables about which Section of the paper the user is reading. The value of the Custom Variables might be “Fashion”. Scope means at which level would you like to set the Variable. These can be Page level, session level, or user level variables. Page level variables last only on a single page. Session variables will follow the user through the site until their Analytics sessions expires. User level variables are like cookies whose values travel with the user even when they return. Depending on our needs we could count this Fashion Section reader by page, session, or even tag them as a permanent Fashion reader. Later, we can analyze this data to determine which content sections are most popular among our readers. We can even cross-segment these Custom Variables using Advanced Segments and Custom reports to gain rich insights.

Some Clever Uses of Custom Variables

1. Dividing casual browsers and members

Perhaps the most common use of variables is dividing “Members” of a web page from casual browsers. If your website has an account login, subscription feature, or even if you’d like to simply count frequently returning visitors you should use Custom Variables to separate them from your regular visitors. Segmenting out these users will allow you to gain rich insights into how the two groups behave. You may even find patterns that help you decide how to convert casual visitors into regular visitors.

2. An online newspaper of blog wants to monitor readership

Extending our example of an online newspaper above, let’s say this same newspaper wants to determine which article’s authors are most likely to attract loyal readership and even subscriptions. To acheive this, you could set a Custom Variable with the author’s name on a page level any time a user visited an article. Cumulatively these page level variables are little votes towards an author’s popularity. Later we can segment the Author Custom Variables by our Subscription and user engagement Goals to see which author contributes most to the success of the website. If you find this metric useful, you might even consider making this metric a part of the writer’s compensation structure.

3. Tracking repeat buyers

There are a number of ways you could use Custom Variables to improve the performance of your E-Commerce site. Knowing how repeat buyers interact with a site vs normal users, and onceover the demographic interests of those repeat buyers, is a powerful metric. To get started try useing Custom Variables at a page-level to monitor categories of products your users are interested in, Variables at a session level to track interest of an individual buyer along the path towards the shopping cart, and user level Variables to track not only the number of times a user has previously purchased but what types of items that user has purchased. Because Analytics has methods that allow you to easily extract this information from it’s cookies, you could do powerful things like make targeted incentives for users that have previously made 2-5 purchases and have indicated an interest in computer accessories. But even more powerful, all this data can be collected within your Analytics account to provide rich data for cross-segmentation that may help you improve your website for future buyers.

Where to learn more

Of course, we’ve only barely touched the surface of what can be done with Custom Variables and implementing it is a whole other story. Now that you know what they are and why they are useful hopefully you are incented to go out an learn to use them. Here are a few links that might help:

• Spend an hour watching Google’s official Custom Variables Webinar
• Google’s official guide to Custom Variables
• Examples of Custom Variables and their users
• Lunametric’s Advanced Custom Variables Tutorial
• ROI Revolution’s Tutorial

Are we forgetting something? Do you have a favorite use of Custom Variables that you want to share with the world? Tell us in the comments below.