Content Groupings can help you group pages in your reports to reflect the organization of your website. For example, the Google Merchandise Store can create Content Groupings for the main parts of their shopping site such as “Accessories,” “Fun,” “Kids,” “Office,” and “Apparel.”
For each of those groupings, you can specify rules to determine which pages are in each grouping. You can create up to five content groupings and as many rules as you want to define a grouping.
To create a Content Group, go into Admin under the View section and select Content Grouping. Then click New Content Grouping. Give the Content Group a name and then select the method you’ll use to configure the grouping.
When setting up Content Groups, you have three options for how you assign pages to groups:
- “Group By Tracking Code” creates a group using your Google Analytics tracking code.
- “Group Using Extraction” creates a group using the URL structure of your pages. To use this method you will add a regular expression that extracts the name of your group from the URLs of your pages.
- And “Group Using Rule Definitions” creates a group based on simple logic rules. For example, you can define one or more rules such as “page contains Android” to group any pages that are related to Android.
You can use one, two, or all three of these methods. If you use multiple methods, Google Analytics will add content to a group based on whichever method matches first. First Analytics will evaluate the tracking code, then see if you’ve defined any extractions, and finally whether you have configured any rules. Within rules, Analytics evaluates the rules in the order in which they’re set.
Click Done to configure the Grouping. Then click Save.
Once you have set up Content Groups, those groupings will be available within 24 hours in the content reports. You can also use Content Group as a dimension in Custom Reports.
Note that you can include the same content in multiple groups. Also, remember that Content Grouping is not retroactive. Content Groups will only include data from the creation date of the group onward. You may want to include an annotation so that other users will know when the content group was created.
