Comments on: The Complete Guide to Leverage Custom Metrics in Google Analytics

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:47:40 +0000

In reply to John.

Hi John,

You’re right, in that case the custom metric would be incremented by two.
You would need technical support (from a developer) to make the custom metric only “work” once per session.
Another option would be to use segments in GA (e.g. analyze sessions w/ Custom Metric > 0 or something like that) and analyze that data.

Segmentation can get you really far (without dev), but it would be too complex to explain in all detail here.

Best,
Paul

By: John

John — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 12:49:47 +0000

Hi Paul,
As hit-scoped metrics my assumption is that if a user interacted with it again it would add to their session tally. So, in your example, if a user subscribed… then navigated around the site a bit and subscribed again (who knows why, just an example, lol). Would that user’s session include “2” for Modal Subscribe? And if so, any ideas on how to make a custom metric unique per session? Thanks!

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 15:08:49 +0000

In reply to Ariana.

Hi Ariana,

Unsure whether that works (never tried it via that method), recommend testing it (preview and debug mode) before deploying.

Best,
Paul

By: Ariana

Ariana — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 13:19:30 +0000

Hi
I see you creat 2 events for each custom metric. But, if I want to creat, let’s say 4 custom metrics for 4 category pages, and I don’t want to creat 4 events. Can I creat a variable for 4 custom metrics index and attach them with trigger “some page view”?

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 08:36:55 +0000

In reply to Lana.

Hi Lana,

Never tried it, but this should be possible. You might need to work with a developer / GTM expert to get this fixed.
From me, it is impossible to pinpoint from here what’s exactly going wrong.

Best,
Paul

By: Lana

Lana — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 14:45:57 +0000

Great article, I noticed you passed a value of 1 to the custom metric. Is it instead possible to send other numbers to it? For example, sales figures?
I tried sending sales figures to my custom metric through GTM but it did not work. Fires properly in GA debugger though.
Thanks.

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Fri, 31 May 2019 07:38:31 +0000

In reply to Ian. Yes, I believe so. Usually I work with it in a different way. Best way is to run a quick test on your own behaviour.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 30 May 2019 21:24:17 +0000

If you create a hit-scoped custom metric and report on it against a user-scoped dimension, how does Google handle this? Does it just sum the values for all of the hits assigned to that user?

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 06:42:06 +0000

In reply to Santiago.

Hi Santiago,

Not sure what is causing this, but you might want to check the events vs unique events numbers for this particular hour. Do you see something unexpected?
And watch the numbers over the next few days so see whether this was just an outlier.

I had it implemented by some dev guys, so it is hard to give specific technical advice.

Best,
Paul

By: Santiago

Santiago — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 21:00:27 +0000

Hi Paul, thanks a lot.
I’ve implemented all of this, but I’m seeing some differences between the number of events and the number of its custom metric. The difference is above the 10%.
When I ran a report comparing total events and my custom metric with a dimension per hour, I can see that the main difference is just in one single hour (52 events – 4 in custom metric).
Do you have any idea about the reason of that? It’s very important for me to fix it, I thought that I’ve done it but now I’m checking again and found this issue.
Hope you can help me! Thanks in advance!