Data Gap Between Custom Dimensions and Pageviews/Landing Page Data

Question

In order to get data about articles, forums, etc., I recently implemented a customer dimension on my website. Implementation progress was as follows:

1. Open the new customer dimension in Google Analytics (hit Scope)
2. Implement the datalayer above the GTM code with the value I want
3. Open a new variable in GTM
4. Add the variable and index number to the Google Analytics tag in GTM
5. publish changes

I have two problems:

1. When I try to create a report, I don't see any page views
2. There is a major gap between the customer dimension data and a simple landing page data.

Does anyone know how to fix that?

Answer 1

There are a few things.

1. Custom dimension. Not customer. Also known as CDs. Make sure you've set it up in the correct GA property.

2. If you want the pageviews to correlate with the hit-level CD, you should add the dimension to all the pageview tags that fire on the site, otherwise you will have pages with this dimension not set. Given that GTM is the only place that fires pageviews, ofc.

3. You should have a fallback value for the CD in case your code doesn't push the value to the dataLayer before the pageview fires.

4. It's good to conduct proper debugging before asking questions. Use the preview mode, learn the debugger and see what are the values of your variable at the time your pageviews fire. Debug it on pages that, judging from GA, have no value set for them.

5. Learn to use the Network tab in Dev Tools. check if your dimension is set correctly in GA pageview hits. Use ?collect for convenience, to filter the rest of requests out. Custom dimensions are in cd# query param where # indicates the index of a CD.

6. Finally, you never publish changes before properly testing them in debug mode. Unless you don't really care about the site or the quality of what you're doing.