What happened next?

Google Analytics, for good reason, likes to deal with session level data. It wants you to ask 'Show me sessions where x occurred'. This is because session level data is an order of magnitude smaller than 'hit' level data. Processing a lot of hit level data is a big ask, especially in a service that half the internet uses without paying a cent.

But still, sometimes you want to know hit level data - so what's an analyst to do? Custom reports go some of the way, as do custom funnel reports.  However, I was recently asked - how long does it take people on average to go from page A to page B?

Enter big query.

With Google Analytics Premium you get a daily export of your hit level data that you can query to your hearts content. I came up with the query below which will give you a summary of:

• How many times page A was hit
• How many times any page was hit after page A
• How many people exit from page A
• How many times page B was hit directly after page A
• What was the average time in seconds between page A and page B for the same user / session

If you've got big query access, I'd encourage you to give it a go. And feel free to steal this query! Brutal critique also welcome. 

SELECT [date], COUNT(hits.page.pagePath) AS pointA, COUNT(nextHitPagePath) AS pointB, AVG(timeToNextPage) AS averageTimeToPointB, COUNT(CASE WHEN nextHitPagePath LIKE '%POINT B%' THEN 1 ELSE NULL END) AS pointBViews, COUNT(CASE WHEN nextHitPagePath IS NULL THEN 1 ELSE NULL END) AS exits, FROM ( SELECT hits.page.pagePath, hits.hitNumber, fullVisitorId, visitId, nextHitPagePath, [date], ((nextHitTime - hits.time) / 1000) AS timeToNextPage FROM ( SELECT [date], hits.page.pagePath, hits.time, hits.hitNumber, fullVisitorId, visitId, LAG (hits.hitNumber, 1) OVER (PARTITION BY fullVisitorId, visitId ORDER BY hits.time DESC) AS nextHitNumber, LAG (hits.page.pagePath, 1) OVER (PARTITION BY fullVisitorId, visitId ORDER BY hits.time DESC) AS nextHitPagePath, LAG (hits.time, 1) OVER (PARTITION BY fullVisitorId, visitId ORDER BY hits.time DESC) AS nextHitTime FROM (TABLE_DATE_RANGE([93475458.ga_sessions_], TIMESTAMP('2015-05-16'), TIMESTAMP('2015-05-31'))) WHERE hits.type = 'PAGE') WHERE hits.page.pagePath LIKE '%POINT A%') GROUP EACH BY [date]

Product-scoped custom dimensions with Google Tag Manager

Product-scoped custom dimensions (and metrics) are one of my favorite features of Universal Analytics. They allow you to categorize your products in a very flexible way, capturing the complexities of real businesses.

I've often been asked to see purchasing behavior for products like 'the red ones' or 'cars with more than 150k on the odometer'. Try doing that with the default eCommerce implementation!

So when I was recently moving an iOS app over to GTM, I wanted to throw on a bunch of custom dimensions and metrics on our products. I found that not only is there no documentation on how to do so, there wasn't even any forum chatter on this subject. Oh Noes!

Eventually the Google Analytics Premium team helped clear things up, so for you benefit here's the trick:

You can't set up your own GTM variables in the product object - you have to declare the dimension directly.

Ergh. So GTM is supposed to remove the need to push static data fields directly into Google Analytics, but this is an exception. So, onto the actual code. Here's what I hoped would work:

[dataLayer push:@{@"ecommerce": @{
                    @"purchase": @{
                      @"actionField": @{
                        @"id": @"T12345",  
                        @"affiliation": @"Online Store",
                        @"revenue": @"35.43",  
                        @"tax":"4.90",
                        @"shipping": @"5.99",
                        @"coupon": @"SUMMER_SALE"},
                      @"products": @[ // List of productFieldObjects.
                        @{@"name": @"Triblend Android T-Shirt",
                          @"id": @"12345",
                          @"price": @"15.25",
                          @"brand": @"Google",
                          @"category": @"Apparel",
                          @"variant": @"Gray",
                          @"quantity": @1,
                          @"coupon": @"",
                          @"howManyArms": @"A thousand arms"}, // My custom dimension

THIS DOESN'T WORK even when you setup the GTM variable on howManyArms and set it as a custom dimension in the eCommerce tag. Basically I think GA won't accept fields that don't have special GA names in the eCommerce objects. The solution is to do this instead:

[dataLayer push:@{@"ecommerce": @{
                    @"purchase": @{
                      @"actionField": @{
                        @"id": @"T12345",
                        @"affiliation": @"Online Store",
                        @"revenue": @"35.43",
                        @"tax":"4.90",
                        @"shipping": @"5.99",
                        @"coupon": @"SUMMER_SALE"},
                      @"products": @[ // List of productFieldObjects.
                        @{@"name": @"Triblend Android T-Shirt",
                          @"id": @"12345",
                          @"price": @"15.25",
                          @"brand": @"Google",
                          @"category": @"Apparel",
                          @"variant": @"Gray",
                          @"quantity": @1,
                          @"coupon": @"",
                          @"dimension6": @"A thousand arms"}, // My custom dimension works!


I hope that helps you as much as it did me!