- [Instructor] As we dive into the reports,
we need to take a brief moment to talk about
how they're organized and some terminology.
Metrics and Dimensions are the ways the reports
are arranged, and they're extremely important concepts
to understand when you're using Google Analytics.
All of the reports that you see are made up of them,
so it's worth taking the time to point them out.
A Metric measures data.
It's quantitative, so it's usually something you can count
and it's basically a number.
Google Analytics provides both out-of-the-box
default metrics and custom metrics you can configure
that may apply to your very specific business needs.
A Dimension, on the other hand,
describes data in groups of that data.
Dimensions are qualitative,
they can break down segments in Metrics
into these distinct categories.
Dimensions and Metrics go hand-in-hand;
as Dimensions break up the data into these categories,
Metrics can quantify that data
so we are able to see the bigger picture.
Okay, these are the academic definitions.
It's probably easier to see this in example.
This is a common report in Google Analytics,
showing the top pages on the site
and the Metrics that are associated with those pages.
In this report, the Dimension is pages,
which are the rows,
and the Metrics for that Dimension are here in the columns.
The number of Pageviews of those pages,
the unique Pageviews, the time on those pages,
the number of times where they were entrances,
the bounce rate, the times they were the exit,
and even the page value for each of those pages.
So, you see that these Metrics are grouped by these pages.
Now, another example is here where those same exact Metrics;
Pageviews, unique Pageviews, time on page, bounce rate,
et cetera, they're gonna be grouped instead by Page Title.
So, these are the titles of the pages and,
because there are more than one page
that has the title of Home,
those all get grouped together
and we see the total number of Pageviews for those.
So, this is just one example,
but here are some more common examples
of Metrics versus Dimensions.
Metrics can be Pageviews, sessions, users,
and we saw bounce rate before, conversion rate.
The Dimensions, the way we could group these,
could be by page, by device type, by country, by browser,
by landing page, even campaigns can have Metrics.
How many users did we get who came by a specific campaign?
How many Pageviews did we get associated
with a certain page?
And, what we see are we can combine these together
in ways that make sense?
Now, there is something else we should talk about
when we talk about ways that make sense, our Scope.
Metrics and Dimensions that work together
have a certain Scope.
Scope is the property of the variable,
either Dimension or Metric,
that determines the level
the value of data is associated with.
On Google Analytics, there are four levels of Scope.
They're Hit, things that happen that are sent back
as one individual piece of data, like a page view.
Session, that would be all the things
that happened as part of a visit.
If I go browse the website, I view multiple pages,
maybe I check out, I interact in different ways,
all of those things are associated with one single session.
We also have User, if I come back multiple times,
and I visit a site multiple times,
I'm gonna have lots of hits.
I could even have multiple sessions,
but I'm still only ever one user.
And, lastly, we have Product level Scope.
This is gonna be things that are associated
with that one particular product.
Now, we're not gonna focus too deeply on this concept,
it's definitely past the essentials course,
but it is important to know that,
in order to function properly,
Metrics and Dimensions should come from the same Scope.
This should make sense,
you can't really apply the number of Pageviews,
which would be a hit-level Metric
that occurs when a user loads that page,
with a campaign source.
A session level dimension that describes the source
from where a session originated.
Now, in this example, it would make much more sense
finding the number of Pageviews across types of pages,
both at the hit level and the number of users
per each source both within the session level Scope.
So, in this case,
a page would have a certain number of Pageviews
and a Source would have a certain number of users
who come from that source.
Okay, hopefully that didn't get too confusing,
but I think it's worth the time to touch on
these three very important concepts
of Metrics, Dimensions, and Scope,
as they will govern so much of our analysis going forward.