How to Create Custom Dimensions

With Custom Dimensions, you can assign any custom data to your visitors or actions (like pages, events, site search, ...) and then view reports of how many visits, conversions, page views, etc., there was for each custom Dimension.

Create, Track and Manage Custom Dimensions

There are two steps to tracking custom dimensions. The first step is to create and define the dimension itself. You must Plan ahead when creating custom dimensions as you can only have 5 to 15 for each scope (depending on the version of MVMCloud Analytics you use) and generally you cannot delete a dimension, only disable it.

The second step is to start collecting custom dimension tracking data. This later stage may require some custom configuration that will vary depending on what data you would like to extract.

How to create a custom dimension

To access the “Manage Custom Dimensions” screen, go to “Administration” by clicking the gear icon in the top right corner. There will be a new menu item “Sites >> Custom Dimensions” in the left menu. They can be edited by anyone who has at least 'Writing' or 'Administrator' access to a specific site. For For each website or application, different custom dimensions can be created.

Before creating a new custom dimension, you must choose whether you need a new dimension in the "Visit" or "Action" scope.

Custom Dimensions in scope “Visit” can be sent along with any tracking request and are stored on the visit of a specific visitor. If you set different values for a given scope dimension "Visit" During the lifetime of a visit, the last value set (in this visit) will be used. A typical example might be any device information or the version of the application the visitor is using.

Custom dimensions in the 'Action' scope can be sent along with any action (page view, download, event, etc.). A typical example would be, for example, tracking a language across any page view, download, or event.

Custom dimensions in the 'Action' scope can be sent along with any action (page view, download, event, etc.). A typical example would be, for example, tracking an author name throughout any page view, download, or event.

Within the action scope configuration screen, there is also the option to configure URL extractions (Extract URL), so you can trigger dimension tracking simply by the page the visitor is on. If you don't need this feature, just ignore it.

Whichever type of custom dimension you create, make sure the Active check box is selected, so that a green tick is shown like in the screenshots above and then press the Create button to activate them.

Tracking a custom dimension

To find out how to track a specific custom dimension, the easiest way is to go to the "Set up custom dimensions" screen. When you click the edit button (pencil icon), you will find the tracking instructions:

You will probably need to use custom code to include the custom dimension value in the final URL parameter.

Managing a Custom Dimension

Using extracts to set a custom dimension value

Extracts can be set for custom dimensions in the "Action" scope so that the value is extracted from the page URL, page title or page URL query parameter automatically, rather than having to manually set it on your site or app.

An example use case might be a custom dimension called "Language". MVMCloud Analytics can automatically extract the URL language code during any tracking request (no tracking code required on the website or app).

To extract the value from a page URL or page title, you need to define a regular expression with exactly one subexpression (one (followed by a )). For example, if you want to extract the English language in the page_en.html page, you can set the pattern page_(.{2}).html. Note that the pattern matches the page URL entire page or title of the page.

Multiple extraction rules can be defined for a dimension, so if the first rule does not match, it will check the following rules and attempt to extract the correct value.

Check out our guide for more details on how to use URL extractions with custom dimensions.

Deactivating a Dimension

If you decide that you no longer need to track a dimension, you can disable it rather than deleting it. As soon as you deactivate a Dimension, the links in the menu will disappear, no values will be tracked for this Dimension, and no reports will be generated for it anymore. Once the dimension is enabled again, everything will work as before and the previously generated reports as well as the raw log data will be restored. will still be available.

1. Log in to your MVMCloud Analytics with an Administrator account;
2. Click the gear icon </ span> in the top menu to visit the Sites section;
3. Click Custom Dimensions in the left main navigation;
4. Click the edit icon next to the dimension you would like to disable;
5. Click the green checkmark so that it becomes an empty checkbox;
6. Click the green Update button to save your changes and deactivate the dimension.