I spoke with Stephanie Werhane of ITS about some Google Analytics report customization options.
Specifically, she needed a report on the usage of our WordPress sites, including monthly page views for each WordPress website, as well as peak daily page views for each WP site for each month.
Google Analytics does not report the technology platform of the underlying website on which it is running (WordPress, Drupal, etc.), and we don’t currently have a custom dimension in the Mason Google Analytics Roll-Up to store the website platform. Though that might be interesting, I don’t currently see a business case for building-in and maintaining this data. In any event, she has a list of our WordPress sites, so she can distinguish WP sites from non-WP sites by host name (domain name).
I showed her how to modify the standard GA page view report to segment by host name instead of page URI, and to use the regex filter to filter for one or more specific host names.
For long term use, I suggested that she could set-up a custom report that:
– segmented page view data by host name (instead of page URI),
– filtered for just the host names she is interested in
– provided a drill-down option for page views for a selected host name by date, sorted by date to determine peak monthly page views, and
– could be scheduled for automatic email on a monthly basis.