Adding Dimensions and Metrics to your Project in Analysis Workspace

In this video, learn about dimensions and metrics, the difference between them, and how to add them to your tables and visualizations in Analysis Workspace. Also learn how to add out-of-the-box Calculated Metrics.

Transcript
Hey everybody, this is Doug. In this video I want to talk to you about adding dimensions and metrics to your project in Analysis Workspace. Now in a previous video we talked about adding panels and visualizations and tables, and those can all be added by using these two top icons up here in the left rail. And now we’re going to talk about the components which are made up of dimensions and metrics and a couple of other things, but we’re going to focus on dimensions and metrics in this video. Now I’ve also said before that the panels and the visualizations are the canvas upon which you will paint your analytics and paint your numbers. So if we take that analogy a little further, then I suppose that the dimensions and the metrics are the paint and so you’ll forgive me if I bring in a little Bob Ross to the video. And you know, we add a metric and then we give it a little friend that is another metric and add it to the table like we’ve done down here. We’ve got some friends. So anyway, I digress, okay. So, you’ll see down on these tables, for instance, that we have dimensions, this is a day dimension. And then we have metrics across the top here, so there are rows and rows of dimensions and then there are columns of metrics, okay? So we can see that on all the different tables that we have down here. So you can see that dimension is a page and you can see page under her dimension right there. And you can see page views is a metric, and so there is a column of metrics and we can add those as we create these tables. And even the other non-table visualizations, if I scroll back up to the top where we put these large numbers on our site, these are indeed metrics. And so, when you are putting different visualizations in your project, you will at least have some metrics and sometimes you’ll have dimensions as well. But for example, in this one it’s just metric and metric. No dimensions here, and if there is a dimension it’s basically just everybody or the entire site. And it would kind of be one row if we put it into a table. So beyond my little painting analogy, if I really wanted to say what are dimensions and what are metrics, the dimensions are the which one. So when you’re asking a question about your site or your app and you say, which something has the most whatevers. So the something is the dimensions. Which page has the most page views? Which marketing channel had the most visitors? Et cetera, so in this case again, the which one is always the dimension. And that’s super easy to see if we scroll down to our page report again and we can see which page has the most page views or the most visitors or the most bounces, et cetera. In fact, if we scroll down to our other pages table then we can see all these different metrics about the pages. So in this case, once again, lots of metrics up here, there is a column for each metric. And then in the rows are the actual dimensions. And so whether it’s a page or a marketing channel, and you can go down here and click show all and we can look at all the different dimensions that are available to us in this report suite. And these are all the different which ones that we could use, right? We could say, which app ID has the most visitors? We could say, which app version has the most visitors? Let’s go way down and I’ll say, you know, which entry asset ID has the most visits or visitors, et cetera? I don’t know what all this data is, it’s just some demo data. But you can see how this would work for you as you would be able to go down through your dimensions and ask those questions. How many page views did I have for this page? How many visits did I have that came from this campaign? How many people came in and searched on my site for something very specific, et cetera? So, that kind of gives you a couple of different ways that you can ask that question. You can say, how many, the metric, how many page views did this page or this dimension have? Or you can say, which dimension had the most metrics? So it’s just a couple of different ways to say the same thing. But I just want you to understand the difference there between dimensions and metrics and hopefully that helps. Now here’s a little gotcha that I want to talk about. If for example, you are looking at your data here and you happen to see something that is there twice… And I’m going to use as an example, app version. And so you’re going down through and you’re looking at the data and you want to see which app version most people were using, right? You have an app out there, you want to see which app version most people are using. And so you might have in your data two different ones here and you can see this one’s a little different, this is app version and app versions. But in many cases it would just basically be the exact same. And what that really means, as you can see here, one is an eVar and one is a Prop. You may or may not have heard these words before, but eVars are custom conversion variables and Props are custom traffic variables. And so you might, depending upon your implementation and the people that setup your code and everything, you might have the same thing in both an eVar and a Prop. So what if this happens, which one do you use? Which one do you drag over to your table? The eVar version or the Prop version? Well, at the highest level I’m just going to point you back to the experts at your site and have them tell you which one to use in different situations, because I could have a really long video talking about the differences between eVars and Props and when you use one and the other. But that’s really beyond the scope of this video. And so to keep it high level: A, yes, go talk to the people at your site who know about the implementation. But answer B is that you can also just typically go with the eVar over the Prop, again unless somebody tells you to go with the Prop over the eVar, but I would normally have people use the eVar. Because again, without getting into a deep discussion here about it, you can use more metrics with the eVar and have it make sense than with the Prop. And if you want to learn more about the differences between eVars and Props, then go ahead and look on experienceleague.adobe.com for some additional videos. But to use these dimensions, in this case an eVar, I’m going to go ahead and move a table over. So a freeform table, I’ll just put it right here in the middle somewhere.
And we’ll go back to our dimensions and I’ll take this App Version eVar and drop it in. And then it’ll give me occurrences by default, but I’m going to get rid of dimensions there and app version, get back to my metrics and just use unique visitors and replace that occurrences metric. Oh, I didn’t really replace it. I missed the drop zone so it added it, that’s fine. I can also just delete that. But again, that is what you do with dimensions and metrics. Dimensions you drop into the main area over here so you can get all the rows with all the different dimensions. And then metrics you’ll drop into the columns up here on the top, and you can add them or you can replace them, et cetera. Now here’s one more little tip: in this case we had lots of people, in fact, 96% of the people that are represented in this dataset, in this Cross-Industry Demo Data had no app version, that’s unspecified here. Well it’s probably because this is comprised of both desktop data or web data and also app data. So one of the things we can do is we can just go into the filter here and I can say, no don’t include the unspecified. Apply that. And now I can say, well when there is an app version, which one had the highest, et cetera, et cetera. So, there’s lots of different things you can do to make this data very specific to you and we talk about it in other videos. But I just wanted to kind of in this one talk about dimensions, metrics. Again put your dimensions, your which one, over here in the rows and put your metrics, your how manys, up here in the columns and you’ll be good to go. Now one more thing that I’ll talk about and that is calculated metrics. Calculated metrics are exactly like they sound, they are metrics that are built by adding or subtracting or dividing the et cetera built off of other metrics. So if I say show all, you’ll see that I have several metrics, lots of them down here, et cetera. And some how different icons here, so you’ll have this one with this little arrow and box, et cetera. And then you’ll see this one that has what looks like a calculator. And this is a calculated metric, so if I click on the information bubble here, it will show me what this calculated metrics was built from. So in this case product shares divided by product zooms. And so these are specific to this data, this is not going to be in your data. But you will be able to see different calculated metrics that are out of the box that can help you there and I can give you an example. One is bounce rate. So if I go to bounce rate. You can see right here this one would be out of the box and it is single page visits divided by entries. In fact, we do have that already down here in one of our page reports. I’ll just scroll down, you can see this… No, I don’t have bounce rate in there, so I could add bounce rate. And I see that maybe it’s not there because this is a site section report. So, we’ll jump back up to my pages. And we will see that I do have a bounce rate up there. So you can see that he bounce rate is in here per page and so in other words when people land on this page, like the homepage, what percentage of the time do they just leave the site and don’t go to any other pages? And that’s the bounce rate, in this case, with the homepage in my fake data here, and it’s 9.3%. But in any case, those are calculated metrics, we’re not going to go over how to create them in this video. But I wanted to show you that you have all your different metrics and there are different kinds; there are ones that are default out of the box, there are other metrics that are built off of custom events or milestones that have been built into your implementation, and then there are calculated metrics, again also both out of the box and then ones that have been built by people on your site in your company to help you with your analysis. Anyway, hope that helps to learn more about dimensions and metrics, good luck.

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