Using Custom Dimensions, you can categorize and differentiate visitors on your website. For example, if you are a SaaS company, you may want to categorize users based on their subscription plans, or a travel agency that recently ran promotional offers may want to view conversion by age-group. This can be done using Report Segmentation.
Every visitor to your website can have unique attributes that differentiate them from others. By default, if post-segmentation is enabled for your plan, VWO automatically collects all standard attributes such as the city/country of the visitor, the device used to access the website, and others. These attributes can be used to slice and dice reports in VWO to get a deeper insight into the test performances.
However, there can be additional attributes you may want to track for your website visitors such as the color of their car, favorite sports, income group, or languages that are specific to your business needs. With Custom Dimensions, you can define custom attributes and associate them with every visitor to your website.
VWO automatically anonymizes PII if any data comes to the VWO servers. However, in situations where it is mandatory to send such data by using Custom Dimensions, you must whitelist the data, and then use the appropriate encryption level with the hashing recommendation of SHA256 and a minimum of 8 characters.
Things to Consider While Working with Custom Dimensions
- The Custom Dimension feature is available in the Enterprise plan and allows you to create a maximum of 50 custom dimensions. You can check this limit in your workspace from the plan Usage section
NOTE: Users with the Owner or Admin access level can add or edit custom dimensions. - For Web Testing, Fullstack, Mobile App A/B, and Personalization campaigns, the Custom Dimension can only be applied with the user-level scope. Also, for report filtering, the Custom Dimension can be used only after the feature is rolled out. To learn more about the scope, refer to Determining Scope in Custom Dimensions
- You can send custom dimension data only from pages where visitors are being tracked. For example, if a heatmap is running on the page, or a test is running
- By default, VWO detects and anonymize all the data that look like email addresses, credit card, social security numbers, phone numbers, authentication token, and other sensitive information. Make sure not to send such data via the Custom Dimensions
- If you wish to explicitly anonymize a custom field, use the Blacklist option, and define the regex pattern of the value to be anonymized. After this, the data of your custom field will no longer be sent to VWO servers.
If you wish to create a custom dimension in VWO, refer to Creating a Custom Dimension in VWO.