How to make a graph in Google Data Studio showing specific url parameters that were queried in my site?

Question

I have a search page on a hotel property website that can have up to 12 parameters in the url. Note that sometimes it may have none of these parameters. The parameters are all for optional facilities that the hotel could provide. If the parameter is present it's value is always 'Yes'.

What I want to do is simply create a visual report such as a bar chart within Data Studio that shows a count of page views for each of these 12 parameters.

To do this I started making custom dimensions using the following REGEX. Each dimension looks for a specific url parameter. In this case 'offers'. To clarify, there are 3 possible scenarios here. A page may not have the url or it may have it with either 'Yes' or 'No' as a value.

REGEXP_MATCH(Page, '(?i)\boffers=yes\b' )

I know that this is definitely a valid REGEX expression that can detect the url parameter "offers=yes", and it can do this without case sensitivity.

However even creating a simple table with dimensions using the exact REGEX above and a third column using the 'Page' dimension never seems to show a 'true' result in my table.

Ultimately I want to visualise this into a bar graph that shows columns for the number of references to each url parameter I am tracking, irrelevant of the page the parameter was part of. Here is a mockup of this ideal end result...

Answer 1

Constructing a Data Studio Report with Regex

1. Create a report and click edit next to your data source
2. Select "Add Field"

Creating Custom Regex Field

In Data Studio escaping is weird. You have to use \\/ instead of \/ to escape a /.

The following regex will match urls with a query string in your example:

REGEXP_MATCH(Landing Page, '.*/\\?swimmingpool=yes$' )

3. Add your regex and then select Update > Done
4. Next, create a chart and add dimensions with the field you just created

In my example, you can now see that /?x=yes returns true.

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If you want to use a bar chart we can do that too by creating a Chart Field:

Next add your conditions:

and Viola!

These probably aren't exactly what you're looking for, but you can use these examples to create your own custom reports.

Edit: If you want to filter out anything that does not include your query parameters:

Now select our "has query string" metric. This is an example of why creating custom dimensions and metrics is useful. See, we created both a dimension and metric for things with query strings. The metric, which is just a variable, that we named has query string we gave the value Has Query String = True. It's a boolean, meaning it's value is either True or False, 0 or 1. In our regex for the dimension we created we are matching urls that have our query string. We're using the metric to help us be more specific.

Now we have only the urls that match, nothing more.