How do I build a custom report of referral traffic for a set of domains in google analytics?

Question

I am building links for my client's website and need to make a custom report in google analytics to show traffic only of the links i build.

I have tried the following:

1. Set up custom report
2. Define metric groups
3. dimension drilldown: defined "referrer path"
4. filter

here I used INCLUDE / regex with following synthax:

^(
(\/domain1.com) |
(\/domain2.com)
)$

I dont get any traffic data at all (which is wrong, when looking at referral data in channels i see visits from these domains.)

How do I do this? Is there a better way? Is my regex wrong?

Answer 1

Yes your regular expression is wrong. \/ is a literal slash (/). A slash never preceeds the domain name.

You also specify that the referrer is exactly just the domain name. That is never the case. You are looking for a "contains" rule so you should leave off the starts with (^ ) and ends with ($) markers.

You also might want to escape the literal periods in your regex with \.. Otherwise a period in regex matches any character.

You need something like:

(domain1\.com)|(domain2\.com)|(domain3\.com)