Google Analytics Query Custom Channel Grouping

Question

I am trying to pull a Custom Channel Grouping for Transaction IDs from Google Analytics. The marketing group has defined a couple of custom Channel Groupings in GA and they want me to pull these fields. I can not find any documentation anywhere which discusses this. It's not a custom dimension and it's not a custom variable. Has anyone else had to do this? Is it possible or do I have to re-implement the rules outside of GA?

Answer 1

Short answer: this is not currently possible (as of June 2015) in the Google Analytics API.

The best workaround I have found is to rebuild the channel grouping in the logic of the API query. For example, if you have a channel group that is defined in your custom grouping as "campaign contains shopping AND source == google," you can write that into the filters line of the optArgs call to the API.

This doesn't strike me as a sustainable, maintainable practice, however -- if the custom grouping is changed, you need to go back and change your code separately -- but it's the best solution available at the moment.

Answer 2

Example code is Javascript:

The filter doesn't seem to work for ga:channelGrouping, so 'filters':'ga:channelGrouping=Direct', fails with the error:

{
    "error": {
        "errors": [{
            "domain": "global",
            "reason": "invalidParameter",
            "message": "Invalid value 'ga:channelGrouping=Direct' for filters parameter."
        }],
        "code": 400,
        "message": "Invalid value 'ga:channelGrouping=Direct' for filters parameter."
    }
}

But you can get the ga:channelGrouping back as a dimension:

gapi.client.analytics.data.ga.get({
    'ids': 'ga:' + profileId,
    'start-date': 'yesterday',
    'end-date': 'today',
    'dimensions':'ga:channelGrouping,ga:date, ga:landingPagePath, ga:pagePath',
    'metrics': 'ga:entrances',
    'sort': '-ga:date',
  })

so you get it in the data:

[
      /*Channel grouping*/
      "(Other)",
      "20150730",
      "blah",
      "vlah",
      "7"
    ]

At the moment I'm planning on filtering the channel grouping in my own code once I get the result back rather than trying to get Google to do this for me. Basically because Google doesn't seem to support this right now...