Google have announced the beta launch of Calculated Metrics, a new feature in analytics that will help digital marketers to gain further insight from their analytics interface, without moving the data into other tools such as spreadsheets. By creating new user-defined metrics based on combinations of existing metrics, calculated metrics calculate and present more meaningful data, allowing for more actionable analysis.
Although this data is already available within your account, previously it would require setting up specific goals, or using separate tools (mostly paid for) to view ratios, percentages and relationships between metrics. Goals and external tools are useful, but you’re limited in the number of goals you can create (in standard Google analytics) and avoiding unnecessary steps will save time and make anomalous data or anything worth spending further time investigating more visible within your account.
Set Up
Calculated Metrics is now in open beta, but may not be available in every account. Universal Analytics is a requirement, but to quickly check whether you can access this new feature, navigate to the Admin tab, select Views and you should be able to see a new option for Calculated Metrics. If this isn’t visible in your account, it may be because you’re using an older version of Analytics. We recommend that you update this as soon as possible.
How to View
Once you’ve activated Calculated Metrics, you’ll be able to create new metrics and view them through custom reports, custom dashboards and unsampled reports. If you haven’t set these up before here are some useful docs on setting up custom dashboards and custom reports.
Use Cases
If you’re not sure how Calculated Metrics will make life easier for you, here are a few use cases that could apply to you or get you thinking of specific ways you could use it.
Margin
If you work with a consistent margin across your product range, calculating margin from overall revenue will be an easy and useful first step into calculated metrics. In this example, let’s say you or your client work with a 50% margin. To calculate this, you need to create a new metric called “Margin” that figures out 50% of Product Revenue.
{{Product Revenue}} * 0.50
Return On Investment
For eCommerce clients, the ability to view actual return on investment through the site is crucial to understanding how each channel and the website as a whole is functioning. For this example, ROI will be calculated by subtracting the cost from margin to create a more realistic view of site performance.
{{Margin}} – {{Cost}}
Subscriber Revenue
We work with a number of subscription based websites so the ability to view the revenue generated from subscription customers is required for analysing website performance. Calculated Metrics provides the ability to view the performance of new subscribers and unsubscribers without leaving the GA interface. For the example below, a subscription is set as a goal with the value of £100 and a cancellation is set as a goal with the value of -£100.
Formula: {{New Subscription (Goal Value £100)}} – {{Cancellation (Goal Value -£100)}}
Let us know how you’re using this new feature and if you need any further help setting up your digital analytics.