Configure hierarchy variables

Hey, what’s up everybody. It’s Doug. In this video, I want to talk about hierarchy variables which are a form of traffic variables. I’m here in the admin console in analytics. And if I go to edit settings and I just mouse over that and go to traffic, you’ll see it here in this area here, hierarchy variables. And that’s what I’ve chosen to get to this page so that we can set up hierarchy variables for our report suite. Now, if you read this little bit here, you will see that you do need to set it up in your implementation as well. It works hand in hand with your implementation. And I guess I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit. You know, hierarchy variables are there like it sounds to give you this hierarchical. It’s a great word, right? Hierarchical view of pages on your site or sections on your site or whatever. But to kind of be able to break it down by level, and then by another level, and by another level. You can see over here that you have, you know, all these levels over here and you can rename them if you want. And it’ll give you that view in your reports. Now, before we go too far and before I get you all excited to use this, this is really, this is really a little bit of an old school version of how to do this, because it was really built before we had analysis workspace and it was for the Reports & Analytics. Reports which you know, didn’t give a great, you know, breakdown by breakdown by breakdown view all the time. And so, we had this hierarchy view. Now, I’m going to show you in a minute how it will work with analysis workspace. So, first of all, I’m going to kind of show you how you do it but then I’m going to show you, you know, some different options. So again, to set this up, you do it hand in hand with your implementation, but, you know, to get this set up in the admin console, you go in here and you add a hierarchy. So you can see that I’ve added this, it’s enabled, you know, I’ve just called it hierarchy 1. You would probably put something like, page hierarchy if you’re going to do, you know, different levels of pages of a hierarchy. of pages of a hierarchy. You can choose a delimiter. And this is for the implementation. I’ll show you that in just a minute. And again, you can choose how many levels at the most you want and then name those as well. Now, I’ve got a tab right here to kind of look at the implementation a little bit, remembering this colon delimiter here. And when I jump over there, it’ll show you some examples of how it can be set up in your implementation. So, on a given page, you can give a hierarchy of where this page sits in the hierarchy of your site. So if your page is under the sports, and then under the local sports, then under the baseball section, you can, you know, put that into this variable. Now you’ll see here that this is comma delimited, whereas in my setup here, I had colon. So, you want to make sure that that delimiter matches whatever you’re going to put into your implementation. And you can see down below, we’ve got a couple other ones where you have a pipe delimiter or a forward slash delimiter as well. And so you just, you know, put s.hier1 and then you can again put where that page sits in the hierarchy of your site. And so that’s how those two would work together. Again, the implementation as well as then the setup here in the admin console. as well as then the setup here in the admin console. Now I mentioned one of the reasons why you would use this in the olden days of analytics, is because, you know, the table type breakdown view of the report was really good. It would give you really good numbers and it was really good to look at. And we didn’t have you know, a better way to do it back then. And now we have, you know, really good ways to do breakdowns in analysis workspace. Now, the other reason why people might have done it before is that there were more limitations in the past on how many variables were available to you. And so this way you could get an idea of the amount of traffic coming to your site. As people came to these different pages, these different sections and subsections and sub subsections, et cetera of your site. Now, if I jump over to the reports, I’ve added a free form table here, and you’ll see here, if I go to my components and search on hier, then I get these different hierarchy levels here. So instead of just choosing a hierarchy report and having it kind of all built out for me, I get to choose exactly how I want to build it out. So for example, if I go to hierarchy level one and I drag this one in, and then I can choose select one or more of these levels and I can go for example, to level two and I’ll drag that in to say, jewelry and accessories. And it’s those two things. There’s level two. What if I grab level three and drop that into jewelry and it’ll break it down further like this. So you do you get this hierarchical view of this, but in reality, I could do that with props, with eVars, you know, with regular variables, I don’t need to use this hierarchy. So it is again, just another tool that you can use if it makes sense for your implementation. You know, for one thing you might let how it is set up here, you know, and how this is set up like this and just a hierarchy variable like this, instead of setting something, you know, like, prop one equals sports and prop two equals local sports and prop three equals baseball. That’s the other way that you could do this. Of course, if you’re going to use props or eVars, would be pretty much similar to that. So, in any case, this has kind of that again, hierarchy view. And if you have pages that you’d like to put into, you know, a hierarchical structure like this, and then be able to go to the reports and build those out like this, and, you know, not use up any props or eVars, then you can use this hierarchy variable and then see the traffic to these different areas on your site. We might drag, you know, page views up in here or visits or visitors or whatever we want. Anyway, I hope that was helpful to understand how to set up and use a hierarchy variable. And have a great day. . -