Channel Grouping Google Analytics

Key Takeaways

Google Analytics has a treasure trove of information about how users behave with your website one of the things that I really like to use are the top conversion paths report within Google Analytics to see what types of sources folks are coming from to my site what are the different touch points they have before they actually finally make a conversion do they start off coming from my paid campaigns and then go through organic and then through a remarketing ad before they convert or is it some other series of touch points the one thing about those reports is that there are tons of preset options available for you to use but it doesn't always drill down as far as we want it to so today I'm going to talk about how to set up a pretty basic filter for custom multi-channel funnels and Google Analytics and then just give some ideas about more advanced options that you can do later I won't be able to go through all of the options available because they're quite frankly are a ton but I want to just show you what the mechanics of changing the multi-channel funnels piece is setting up a custom channel grouping so it'll get you started down the path of customizing this report to be as impactful as it can be for you let's jump in in the Google Analytics report you can find the top conversion paths report in the left-hand navigation under conversions multi-channel funnels then top conversion paths and it's gonna look something like this there's a decent amount of data that pops in and it will always default down to this mcf channel grouping path report so you can customize the different conversions that you actually have coming in here you can also customize the path length that you want to see two or more makes the most sense because otherwise there will just be single line items and then you can also adjust whether you want it to be traffic from all sources or just Google Ads and then whether look back window is so what we want to start talking about are the report pieces down here at the bottom so there are a number of different reports that you can start with like I said the first is always going to default you to the ncf channel grouping path report and that's gonna look like this they've got direct organic search paid search broken out for this specific account that we're looking at the main paths are actually around just these different touchpoints there are a number of other sources and that sort of thing from this report but since they don't have quite as much volume they're just showing up here you can also then utilize any of these blue links for different ones so let's look at the source medium path and that'll look something like this it shows Google organic was the first touch and then they came back through direct or just to direct visits so on so forth you guys get it you're smart any of these other ones are just default reports that you can break into and if you click this other button there will be different parameters that you can choose under acquisition and you can choose campaign path keyword path landing page URL you can also choose things under Google Ads like the Google ads campaign path or campaign ID or all sorts of different things search query path lots of options to have available there but one of the things that you might want to start doing is to customize the report into something a little bit more specific so today I want to break out our search campaigns between just regular first touch search and DSA campaigns because I want to see how they're performing differently when it comes to this top conversion path report so the way that we'll do that is actually go to this channel groupings drop-down here and you'll see there are two options create a custom channel grouping which sounds like what we want they'll get to that in a second or copy mcf channel grouping template I would suggest for first time users we're pretty much always going to do this copy mcf channel grouping template and here's why when I click on this it opens up this entire builder and you'll notice that all of the preset groups that were part of that default report are already still in here you can then click the pencil and start to break out the different settings for each of these so if you wanted to change any of the parameters around direct you can you can even change the different color that you have going in here right you can make it look like whatever you want if you were to go in and click on the create a custom channel grouping it's gonna look like this it's blank you have to start from scratch and pick every single parameter piece that you want it's got a little bit of a help down here if you want to learn how regular expressions work and channel groupings you can start from there but for the most part unless you're pretty advanced in GA or you just really want something specific to come out of it I would suggest not doing the create and edit one from scratch instead I would suggest that you used the MCF channel grouping duplicate and just adjust what's in there to what you need it to be so that's what I'm gonna do today so I'm gonna come in here and click the copy and CF grouping template and then to get DSA as a separate line item in this I'm actually going to change the name of the report that I've got so that way I'll know what it is later on so just mcf with DSA broken out and then I'm going to need to make a change to the paid search group since that's where DSA will live in this regular custom channel grouping so I'm just going to click the pencil you'll see the settings that Google Analytics uses by default to bring up the paid search group so I'm gonna change the name of it now I'll know that it's just paid search in general obviously I'll leave all the color and all that sort of thing the same but what I need to do is I need to create an and statement to say that the campaign name does not contain DSA so we want to do campaign name does not contain DSA because I know that I don't use the three character pattern of DSA anywhere else in any of my campaign names so I'm just gonna include does not contain DSA and then I'll hit done now what I need to do is I've basically removed DSA performance from this paid search general group so I need to add it back in for its own line item so here I will just define a new channel and I will call it DSA and then to get there I'll do the same logic that I used for removing it from paid search general but instead of does not contain obviously we will use contains and now I can choose whatever I want it to look like for this one we'll just do bright purple that way it'll show up really well and click done so now I have my custom channel grouping with my additional DSA channel in here I'll click Save you'll notice that when you click save it automatically defaulted back to the MCF channel grouping path over here so to find the report that we want we come and click on this down arrow and then you'll see that the line item of mcf with DSA broken out is saved here any of your custom channel groupings will be saved as part of this breakdown over in the channel grouping section so we'll click on it and in the same way that we don't have lots of other sources showing up down here DSA also doesn't have a lot of volume so what I'm going to do is filter for it here to show the different line items that include DSA in my channel groupings now we can see DSA showing up so we have a lot of folks coming from the site that click on DSA ads first and then come back direct once DSA 12 first time come back direct twice some go through DSA and then come through paid search general you get it there are a number of different paths but now we can see how DSA campaigns perform in comparison to paid search general and it's not really a surprise that DSA would be the first touch here because the way that we use DSA is that it's got a little bit of a broader reach based on the content of our webpages compared to our actual keywords if the keywords we want are that specific they're gonna be part of the paid search general group so this is how we can start to see things broken out separately to understand what the user flow is what the touch points are that include a DSA campaign there are even some that people start off hitting some of our keywords that we target and then coming back through DSA or organic search through DSA or DSA through display you guys get it again you're smart you can also read so this is how you start to break things out into individual groupings when you want to go back and make any adjustments to this there's a little bit of a nuance that you need to do it so when you clicked on this you'll notice that there's a clipboard here this just means copy the report that you have just created you cannot edit directly from this field but if you wanted to do the same type of iteration you wanted to keep this mcf report with DSA broken out but then also create a different version where maybe you also have remarketing broken out in your display verse prospecting you can start to do that and create different reports and they'll all show up here but if you want to edit your custom channel grouping we actually need to go away from the screen and into the admin section of GA you'll then need to make sure that you have edit access at least to the account that you're in and over in the far right under view you'll come down here and you'll see custom channel grouping beta that's where we need to go this will show you all of the line items you have for each different custom channel grouping that you've created and there will be a button over here that says actions and this is how you can edit copy delete share amongst different profiles if you want to share it across a different view but for right now let's just say we want to edit it and change a color just for fun for a sake of doing it so let's say we want to take paid search general from the thin blue with the outline to just a dark green just hit done hit save and it's as easy as that you can also like I said delete do anything else from here you can also create a brand new custom channel grouping the thing you cannot do from here is duplicate the default mcf channel grouping that Google Analytics is created but you can create just a brand new from scratch grouping that you want here so now that we've created the small color edit to our report we can head back into top conversion paths come down into our custom channel grouping and see that now paid search general is just a bright green color just for sake of being able to see it a little bit better so it's as simple as that custom channel groupings are certainly a step up from the basic uses within Google Analytics but hopefully this short demo has showed you that they're nothing to be intimidated by and they can be really useful if you want to start to see how different parts of your advertising campaigns are impacting the conversion paths what the different touch points are that people have coming through for the video today I broke out just DSA verse our regular search campaigns to see how those impacts since it's got a little bit of a different way of targeting search users but there are lots of ways that you can use custom channel groupings to break apart performance for different segments let's say you want to start breaking out the display grouping they have in there by default to see remarketing first prospecting another way I like to break it down is if you're using a full funnel strategy throughout your campaigns across all of your channels which I hope you are you can start to utilize the custom channel groupings to see if your top of funnel efforts are really the first touch if mid funnel are helping in the middle and then if bottom funnel are the ones that are actually converting people or if there's something else are big the opposite way our other channels helping out what are you user flows that are coming in there so think about all the different ways that you could learn where are the ways that people come into your website what are the different touch points they have going through all the way to conversion and then how can you leverage that to optimize your campaigns moving forward thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos