Hi Deyeng,

I recommend working with segments here. Setting up different views with filters on subdirectories will greatly influence data quality. You will get a lot of (not set) data points when visitors travel from one section (not being measured / filtered out) to other ones (being measured).

Best,
Paul

My client has a big website with different business departments involved. what they want is each department units should have a reporting view setup in gA. I am thinking of setting up segments rather than having multiple analytics views but my problem is these people aren’t that technical. 2nd option is to create gA views and use advance filters to remove the data that doesn’t belong to other department units. The URL’s are built this way /test/accounts/, /test/loans/, /test/credits/ and so on.
I wonder if this possible without losing data consistency.
Thanks

Thanks for the heads up Seth! Will take a look at your suggested tool. Cheers!

The company offers data governance solutions aimed at Adobe, but I really enjoy the debugger from ObservePoint if you want to consider adding that to your debugging tools list.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/observepoint-tagdebugger/daejfbkjipkgidckemjjafiomfeabemo?hl=en-US

Hi Aditi,

Thanks for your comment, I appreciate it. And, I will check out your tools. :-)

Best,
Paul

Thank you for the amazing list of items one should set up/ configure when they start using Google Analytics.

I’ve seen a lot of marketers setting up google analytics without creating any test view or filter view. In the end, it’s the client who suffers when data gets lost :(

Anyway, I wanted to suggest you a tool I use for debugging: Omnibug & Event Tracking Tracker. Both are chrome add-ons and are quite useful.

Cheers & Keep Sharing,
Aditi

P.S. I’m sharing this post on twitter to help marketers learn how to set up GA Account well :)

Great question Wes and thanks for reaching out!
– You’re right – the filter ensures that you don’t collect any data before you have your settings in place.
– I have used “99 Don’t Remove” for naming convention purposes – so in my case it is usually the last filter in the list. And I remove it once everything is ready to roll!
– The “filter pattern” isn’t that important as long as you set it up in a way that it ensures it doesn’t match with any hit coming in, that’s the trick.
– For the Raw Data View, if needed and relevant, this specific filter can be applied in that view as well – until you start collecting data. The remark refers to that you shouldn’t modify the data collection process of the Raw Data View once it goes live.

Hope this helps clarify!
Best,
Paul

Also, do we *not* add the ’99 Don’t Remove’ filter on our ‘Raw Data’ view?

Thanks for this great resource!

Hi Jackie,

First of all, tracking subdirectories in different views is usually a bad idea. You will have to deal with (not set) value dimensions when people navigate from one “company” directory to the other. In addition, it would be too much to get a view for each company.

In a sense they are already tracked separately, two URLs:
– Xyz.com/digital_media/companyA/Spring2017
– Xyz.com/digital_media/companyC/Spring2017

You can distinguish between them in one view based on /companyA/ vs /companyC/.

In this case and for this purpose I would work with one view. Of course you can set up other views for different purposes as explained on my site.

You can use landing page segmentation to see whether people go from one company directory to another in one session.
You can set up content grouping to group pages per company in a logical structure and see which pages are most popular, where people enter your site.
You can use page value to determine the correlation between digital media page consumption and goal conversions.

There are a ton of things you can do, without having to create additional views for this purpose.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Paul

This is what it looks like:

Company xyz – 10000000
Xyz.com

Xyz.com/digital_media

Xyz.com/digital_media/companyA

Xyz.com/digital_media/companyA/Spring2017
Xyz.com/digital_media/companyA/Summer2017

Xyz.com/digital_media/companyB
Xyz.com/digital_media/company/Spring2017
Xyz.com/digital_media/company/Summer2017

Xyz.com/digital_media/companyC
Xyz.com/digital_media/companyC/Spring2017
Xyz.com/digital_media/companyC/Summer2017

How do I track the magazines separately?
Thanks for any advice.
Jackie