Overview
Standard Google Analytics tracks a website’s business value using goals (and transactions if e-commerce is enabled). Intelligence extends this tracking by enabling any kind of hit to be valued adding to the business value of a site.
The two primary hit types Intelligence focuses on is pageview and event. A business value can be added to pageviews to score the number of sessions, pageviews, sticks (non-bounces) or visits to high-value pages. Valued events are useful for tracking micro conversions or as a work around for GA’s goal behavior.
The metrics for pageview and event valued hits are stored as custom metrics depending on the type of hit.
When valued hits are sent to GA from Intelligence two dimensions are added to universally identify the hit:
- Hit Title (dimension17) – The human friendly name of the hit
- Hit URI (dimension18) – A unique identifier for the hit in URI format
Both the custom metrics and dimensions are setup in Google Analytics when the “Config GA” feature is run in the Intelligence Admin.
Event tracking
Events are the primary method for tracking important interactions in Google Analytics. Intelligence events have three modes:
- Standard – typically for tracking common GA event
- Valued – typically for tracking micro conversion
- Goal – typically for tracking macro conversions
All modes are tracked using standard GA event metrics and dimensions:
Metrics:
- Total Events – The number of times an event was triggered
- Unique Events – The number of times an event was triggered counted only once per session.
- Event Value – Total value of triggered events
Dimensions:
- Event Category – The event category
- Event Action – Event action
- Event Label – Event label
For valued and goal events, Intelligence sends additional count and value custom metrics. These metrics can be used in GA to differentiate standard, valued or goal events.
Goals
Goals in Google Analytics are technically not a hit but in many ways act like one. For calculating business value the two primary metrics are:
- Goal Completions – The number of times a goal was completed
- Goal Value – The total value produced by the completed goal
It is important to note that each GA goal can only be completed once per session. Any subsequent goal triggers will be ignored both in the goal completions and goal value metrics.
Goal events
Intelligence triggers goals by using specifically formatted events called goal events. This method has the benefit of effectively turning a goal into a hit allowing additional data to be associated with a goal such as which form was submitted to generate a lead.
Metrics:
- Goal Events – The number of times a goal event was triggered
- Goal Event Value – The total value produced by the triggering the goal event
Hit Dimensions:
- Hit Title – “Goal: [Goal Name]”
- Hit URI – “ga:goal:[Goal Id]”
Each time a goal event is sent the goal event is incremented and the sent value added to goal event value. This enables you to determine the total metrics of goal events even though the goal they are triggering will only count once per session.
Valued events
Valued events are an optional feature of Intelligence designed to improve the tracking of micro conversion goals. They are particularly useful as a work around for GA’s goals only counting once per session.
Metrics:
- Valued Events – The number of times a valued event was triggered
- Valued Event Value – The total value produced by the triggering the value event
Hit Dimensions:
- Hit Title – “Event: [Event name]”
- Hit URI – “ga:event:[Event Id]”
Pageview values
In standard Google Analytics, there is not a way to associate a business value with the hit other than using a URL destination goal. With Intelligence you can also trigger an valued event to trigger when someone reaches a page to associate business value with a page hit.
Intelligence also provides a third method by simply setting passing a value with the page hit. This is typically used in two ways. One to transform standard GA traffic metrics such as sessions, pageviews and bounces in to a scoring value. The other is to associate value to a person hitting specific page that are not important enough to warent triggering a goal or valued events.
Metrics:
- Valued Pageviews – The number of pageviews with a value was sent
- Pageview Value – The total value produced by pageview hits
Hit Dimensions:
- Hit Title – “Page: [Page title]”
- Hit URI – “ga:page:[Page path]”
Total value
To determine the total value that is produced by goals, valued events and pageviews we can use a calculated metric. Unfortunately, calculated metrics cannot currently be automatically setup via GA’s management API. But can be created in the Google Analytics admin under a profile’s “View” config.
You should setup two calculated metrics to report the total value generated by a property and another for the total number of valued hits:
| Name | External Name | Type | Formula |
|---|---|---|---|
| Valued Hit Value | calcMetric_ValuedHitValue | Currency | {{Goal Value}} + {{Valued Event Value}} + {{Pageview Value}} |
| Valued Hits | calcMetric_ValuedHits | Interger | {{Goal Completions}} + {{Valued Events}} + {{Valued Pageviews}} |