Creating Content Groupings in Google Analytics

Tony Villanova - February 11, 2014

The content grouping functionality in Google Analytics allows you to organize the content of your website into logical groups so that you can understand how different categories of content work together, as well as which categories are the most popular among your visitors.

Once created, content groups become a dimension available in content or custom reports that will allow you to visualize your data based on each group. For example, a car dealer might be interested in knowing whether cars or SUV’s are more popular; and out of those, which make and model is the most popular.

Setting Up Content Groups

You can set up content groupings by either modifying the Google Analytics snippet on each page of your site or by defining rules in the Google Analytics interface.  In most cases you would want to define your content groups in the GA interface as it’s not practical or easy to deploy unique versions of the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) to the pages of your site. Let’s walk through the interface and create a group. In your Google Analytics Account go into Admin and select the view that you would like to apply Content Groupings to and then click Content Grouping (Edit access is required).

Once in Content Grouping select Create New Content Grouping.

In our example scenario, we are going to create the top level category of SUV’s.

Within your new Content Grouping you have 3 options on how to group your categories: Group by Tracking Code, Using Extraction, or Using Rule Definitions. For our example scenario we are going to Group Using Rule Definitions, which in our opinion is one of the easiest methods.

Now that we have created a Content Group (SUVs) we are going to want to create groups within it for the different Makes of the SUVs and within the different Makes we are going to define rules that will tell GA which pages/ Models should be grouped within the Make group.

As you can see above have already created the Mercedes Rule Set and are now creating the Porsche Rule Set. (You have to complete each Rule Set one at a time. This is accomplished by clicking Done which allows you to create additional Rule Sets within your Content Group.)

Within the Porsche Rule Set we are telling GA that if the page contains Cayenne or Macan in the URL (page titles can also be used) GA should group these under the Porsche group.

Notice that you are able to apply And/Or rules depending on what you are trying to group. In our example scenario, we want to use the Or rule so that we are able to add multiple Models under one Make.

If you wanted to apply conditions using the And rule you also have the ability to drag the rules to specify the order in which the rules should apply.

Once you have defined all the rules for your Content Group click Save and you have just created your 1^st of 5 Content Groups!