Content Grouping in GA4

Decide the names and number of content or product categories that you want to use as content groups in GA4.

For example, in a furniture store, you may want to create content groups for;

• Sofas,
• Chairs,
• Tables,
• Beds.

To identify the web pages that will be part of each content group, you can use regular expressions.

For instance, to identify all webpages related to the "Sofas" content group, you can use the following regular expression:

sofa|couch|lounge

Similarly, to identify all webpages related to the "Chairs" content group, you can use the following regular expression:

chair

Log in to your GTM account and select the container where you want to create a regex table. Then, click on "Variables" from the left-hand side menu.

Click on "New" to create a new user-defined variable.

Click on "Choose a variable type to begin setup" and select "RegEx Table" from the list.

In this case, you can name it "Content Grouping" so that it's easy to identify and reference later on.

Click on "Input Variable" and select "{{Page Path}}" from the dropdown list, as this is the variable that contains the value you want to match using a regular expression.

Click on "Add Row" and enter your input pattern and its corresponding output value.

Here, the input pattern will be the regular expression that we created in step 2 (sofa|couch|lounge), and the output will be the content group name (Sofas) corresponding to that expression.

Note: The pipe symbol use to separate the two and more words.

Enter all of your input patterns and their corresponding output values in the regex table, as shown in the screenshot.

If you want to create a catch-all group for any pages that don't match your defined patterns, click on the "Set Default" checkbox and type the name of your catch-all group (e.g. "Others").

In the advanced settings area, you'll see several checkboxes.

• Uncheck the 'Full matches only' checkbox in the regex table to allow partial matches.
• Additionally, uncheck the 'Enable capture groups and replace functionality' checkbox, as Google recommends doing so when 'Full matches only' is unchecked.
• For a case-insensitive match, make sure to leave the 'Ignore case' checkbox checked.
  

Click on the "Save" button to save the new regex table variable.

In the left-hand sidebar of the GTM, click on "Tags". Next, find your GA4 configuration tag and click on it.

Click on the "Fields to Set" dropdown and click on "Add Row" to create a new field.

Here, you'll need to write the regex table name that we created before.

In our example, type "content_grouping" in the "Field Name" text box and "{{content grouping}}" in the "Value" text box.

Click on the "Save" button.

Click on the "Preview" button to enable the preview mode.

Enter the URL of your article page and click "Connect".

This will redirect you to the article page.

Navigate back to Google Tag Manager and click "Continue".

Click on "Consent Initialization" on the left-hand menu, then click on "Variables".

Scroll down to find the "Content Grouping" variable and check its value.
If the URL you entered in preview mode is related to the content grouping value, then everything is working properly.

Click on the "Cross" button to close and click "Stop Debugging".


Repeat these steps to test other articles and control their values to ensure that everything works properly.

Login to your GA4 account. Click on the "Admin" icon in the bottom left corner of the screen. In the "Property" column, click on "DebugView" and then "pageview" event. Next, click on the "content_group" parameter to see the value of your content group. This will confirm that everything has been passed to GA4 properly.

Go back to GTM, and click on the "Submit" button in the top-right corner. A side panel will open up. Give your work a new name, and click on "Publish" to complete the process.

Login to your GA4 account.

In the left-hand menu, select "Reports". Next, under the "Life Cycle" section, choose "Engagement". Then, click on "Pages and Screens".

To view the content group data, click on the dimension drop-down menu in the data table.

Then, choose "Content Group" to see the data.