{"id":1156,"date":"2015-11-06T10:44:18","date_gmt":"2015-11-06T04:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/promincproductions.com\/blog\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2015-11-06T10:44:18","modified_gmt":"2015-11-06T04:44:18","slug":"wordpress-add-google-analytics-content-grouping-with-google-analyticator-post-category","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/promincproductions.com\/blog\/wordpress-add-google-analytics-content-grouping-with-google-analyticator-post-category\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress – Add Google Analytics Content Grouping with Google Analyticator – Post Category"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google Analytics content grouping is a feature that really helps to break down site usage in a new level that can be super powerful. \u00a0But the point of this post isn’t to promote Google Analytics Content Grouping – you can read more about Content Groups\u00a0from Google<\/a> if you need to know more. \u00a0The focus of this article is around how to simply add content grouping to a WordPress website.<\/p>\n

A Plethora of Options<\/h2>\n

The first, and possibly most simple solution, would be to use\u00a0the rule builder within Google Analytics itself to group together content. \u00a0However, it’s common that most sites don’t have a standard pattern that is consistent enough to write a rule or regular expression that will create the group sufficiently enough. \u00a0That is the reason for going one step further with writing some code to add the appropriate tag to your Google Analytics requests.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen many solutions that utilize Google Tag Manager to implement this, and that is something that I have chosen to NOT use. \u00a0Google Tag Manager is powerful and helpful, but honestly I have never utilized it for several reasons. \u00a0The two main ones are that I am a developer and so thus I prefer to just put the code in place directly as opposed to utilize a 3rd party tool to do something I can do. \u00a0The other issue I see with GTM is that it is a 3rd party tool – the more code you try to load that doesn’t come from your server directly the more potential issues you introduce in terms of site load time, possible server outages, etc.<\/p>\n

Another way to approach this problem is to hard-code Content Grouping code into the site, but if you are like most WordPress admins that use a plugin to implement Google Analytics you’ll need to send the Content Grouping request to Google Analytics via another request – typically an event request. \u00a0This isn’t a bad solution, but is inflating the requests you are sending and it’s not really all that necessary when you could pass this into the standard page view request. \u00a0That is what the solution below will do.<\/p>\n

Requirements for the Solution<\/h2>\n

\u00a0but I’ll focus on the method I’m using, which includes utilizing the\u00a0Google Analyticator WordPress Plugin<\/a> to implement Google Analytics. \u00a0There may be other plugins that will work with this solution – it all depends on if you can inject additional tracking parameters through the plugin or not.<\/p>\n

You also need to be able to modify your functions.php file. \u00a0So if you don’t have access to your codebase or feel comfortable modifying your site’s code, then this is not the solution you should use.<\/p>\n

Setup Content Grouping in Google Analytics<\/h2>\n

The first step is to enable and setup content grouping within Google Analytics.<\/p>\n

\"Configure<\/a>
Configure the Google Analytics Content Grouping settings to create a content group. Google Analytics allows you to have 5 different content groups, but you can have sub-content\/groups under each content group.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n