How to Enable Demographic Reports and Advertiser Features, and Exclude Domain Referrals in Google Analytics

Transcript:

This is Rick Reinard. I’m the manager of web analytics for Alight Analytics, and I’m going to show you two new features Google Analytics has added to the admin.

These features are interesting because in the past you used to have to put custom code on your page to enable both of these, but now they’re just features within this admin section.

The first we’re going to look at is under your ‘Properties Settings,’ where you can enable demographic and interest reports and advertiser features with one click of a button. So once you click into your properties settings, just scroll down and you’ll see two new check boxes: one for enable advertiser features and one for enable demographics and interest reports. After you hit those, just click save below.

I’m also going to show you how you can exclude referral visits from certain domains in your reporting.

In the past you used to have to use cross domain tracking to try to exclude referral visits. Now you can just click on ‘Tracking Info’ and down on ‘Referral Exclusion List.’ You may want to use this feature if you often send people off to another site and then they come back to yours. Often times, we’ll see this with clients who have eCommerce sites and the transaction may take place somewhere else. So you’re on your site, go to the shopping cart and come back, and you don’t want that to be counted as a new session, so you’ll exclude the shopping cart visit. You’ll also notice that Google Analytics automatically puts your domain in the referral exclusion list. But if you’d like to add another one, you just hit ‘Referral Exclusion’ and in this domain box, just type in the domain that you want to exclude. In our case, I want to exclude traffic from this domain so that when it comes back to our site after all of the links we have to it, it doesn’t look like a new session.

So that is how you add referral exclusions. And the instant I put it in there it saves it and you’re good to go.

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