CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptgoogle-analytics
user7242966
user7242966

Reputation: 347

any reason not to send data with events as opposed to custom dimensions?

It seems that Custom Dimensions are the new way to send custom data from a website to GA. I'm new to GA but my manager has used GA in the past and I'm guessing this was before the CD structure existed in GA. Do you know when the CD structure was introduced in GA?

He has sent custom data to GA in the past using events. This seems like a viable way of sending data and another manager at my company had referred to this approach last week so it seems like maybe this was a standard approach before GA introduced CD's. So given the following request:

var myRequest = 
{
    UserID:1234, 
    SelectedReportType:1,
};

What are the tradeoffs between sending this request data to GA as a CD like this:

ga('set', 'dimension1', JSON.stringify(myRequest)); 
ga('send', 'pageview');

Vs sending this request data to GA as event data like this:

ga('send', 'event', {
    'eventCategory':'MyWidgetUserSelection',
    'eventAction':JSON.stringify(myRequest)
});

?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 260

Answers (1)

Eike Pierstorff
Eike Pierstorff

Reputation: 32760

Custom dimension where introduced with the switch from "classic" Analytics to Universal Analytics (IIRC that was in 2012), where they replaced (more or less) custom variables.

"Classic Analytics" (not an official name, AFAIK the previous GA version did not have a name other than GA) was a pretty messy thing that pretty much used the technology of the original Urchin tracker (Urchin was a web tracking company Google acquired in the early 2000s and rebranded their product as Google Analytics). Classic analytics pre-computed a lot of data on the client side (using up to five different cookies), including traffic source attribution, before it made a rather convoluted image request to the Google server.

In contrast Universal Analytics was designed on top of a clean protocol, the measurement protocol. It is "universal" because any device or program that can make a http request can now send data to Google Analytics. Universal Analytics does not compute any data on the client side, the data is processed only after it arrives at the Google tracking servers.

"Classic" Analytics had up to five custom variables in different scopes (hit, session,user)). They were displayed in the "custom" menu item of the GA interface (which is still there, but is now useless unless you have old data that was collected with classic analytics). Five variables posed a pretty tight limit, plus it was not always easy to understand how exactly they were supposed to work. So people developed a habit of storing additional data not in custom variables, but in events.

Universal Analytics in the free (commercial) version offers 20 (200) custom dimensions in four different scopes, to wit hit, session, user and product (and an additional 20 (200) custom metrics, although very few people seem to use custom metrics). "Hit scope" means you can add a dimension to every single interaction. "Session scope" only retains the last value for a session. "User scope" is primarily for values that are set once per recurring user (i.e. a user turns into a customer). With the product scope you can add additional properties to the products in an ecommerce-transaction (or production impression etc. if you are using enhanced e-commerce tracking).

Conceptually event tracking and custom dimensions are not remotely comparable. A dimension is a property that is connected to an interaction hit (or a collection of interaction hits like a session or a user) and allows to break down metrics into indivual rows. For example the "pageview" metric can be broken down by page path or page title, which are automatically collected. You might add a custom dimension "page category" and you can break down your total number of pageviews into separate rows that show the number of pageviews per category.

Custom dimensions do not have their own report; you can select them as secondary dimension in a standard report, or create custom reports based on them. You can also use custom dimensions to segment sessions or users by the respective values for the dimension.

Events on the other hand are interactions in their own right, with their own set of default metrics and dimensions (in fact you can amend events with their own custom dimensions). Proper usage of events is to track interactions that not load a new page (or do not change the page content enough to warrant a pageview call).

You can use events for segmentation (i.e. "show only sessions where the user had a certain event"), but you cannot break down pageview metrics by event properties. That is actually the main difference.

A more practical concern is that events, unlike custom dimensions, count toward you data collection limit (the free version of Google Analytics allows for 10 mio hits per month only, although the limit is so far not strictly enforced). Since custom dimension are not interactions by themselved they do not count towards the quota.

Upvotes: 1

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