#TipTuesday: Clarifying "other" in analytics

Kirstie Macfarlane

Have you ever been going through your analytics data and seen "other" in your results?

You may be unsure of what this means, so I'm here to clarify for you!

Whenever you see "other" in your results, it means there's no data for that field (or "null").

You’ll likely see this on chart where you’re grouping data by a parameter that doesn’t apply to each and every event in the data stream/source.

For instance:

• Pageviews Grouped by Category Name: “Other” would display for all pageviews for non-category pages
• Search grouped by User Rank: “Other” would include all searches made by users without a Rank

Branwyn T

The way I tend to think of this is that "other" means "value not found."

So if you're not filtering out category page views in your chart, but your grouping is "Category" you're going to get page views for "Other" because some page views don't have a Category Name to display!

That's why I recommend using filters to remove empty (or, Other) results. In this case, you could use a "Category Name is not null" to remove that pesky "Other" result!