Understanding Dimensions and Metrics in Google Analytics

Now, let's discuss dimensions and metrics. Dimensions and metrics are essentially the building blocks of Google Analytics, which analyzes data and reports data. So we need to understand what they are, identify the key dimensions and metrics, and understand how combining dimensions and metrics will provide increased insight.

So, in Google Analytics, all data is organized using dimensions and metrics. Dimensions provide context, now the who, what, where, and when. Metrics provide a numerical value for analysis and are the how much or how well.

And dimensions and metrics appear to gain deeper insights into how users navigate your site, engage with your content, and convert. So, let's dig a little deeper into what we mean by dimensions. Dimensions are qualitative values; they describe what the data is about.

Think of them as labels, categories, or characteristics of users, sessions, or events. You answer the question as to what a dimension is with non-quantitative responses. You can't calculate with these values because they're not numbers.

What are they? They're cities. A key dimension could be city, where users are located, device category, the type of device they have, their mobile, their desktop, the path page, the URL of the page viewed, the traffic source, where did the visit come from, they came from organic search, they came from social media, they came from a referring website, and the event name, what kind of action occurred. They downloaded a form, and they watched a video, which would be examples of events.

Metrics, on the other hand, are numbers; they are quantitative values, they measure something, you can calculate with them, you can add them, you can average them, and they show the volume or performance of user behavior. A key dimension would be users, how many, the number of unique users, sessions, the number of visits to the site, and engagement time. The total time users were active, conversions, number of goal completions, right, counting how many conversions, event count, how many times the event occurred, how many times that video was viewed, and how many forms were downloaded.

All numerical answers, all quantifiable, and all numerical. All right, now we can combine dimensions and metrics to gain even further insight into engagement, website, and performance, marketing performance. An example there would be the dimension being country, the metric being users, the number of users from each country, right, the USA is the country, the users are 500, so we know with that combination how many users are in the US.

Page title and views, the number of times each page was viewed, and the number of times each individual URL was viewed. Device category, how many conversions from each device category, how many conversions from mobile, how many conversions from laptop, right, so you gain more insight by combining those two, not just getting the total number of conversions, now you're getting it by device type, you can get conversions by traffic source, you know, how many of our conversions are coming from a Google search versus a meta ad versus our email campaign. And traffic source and engagement time, the average engagement time from each traffic source, so you might find that your average engagement time from people coming from a Google search is 5 minutes and 30 seconds, whereas the average engagement time from someone coming from a social ad is 2 minutes and 20 seconds, well, that will likely tell you that your visitors coming from your organic search might be more engaged, and why would that be? Because they likely have more intent, they've actually initiated a search looking for men's sweatshirts, right, as opposed to seeing an ad for men's sweatshirts on their Instagram feed and maybe clicking through, maybe just out of curiosity, maybe, okay, I'll come back to that later, whereas if you're typing in a search term, it probably means that you are intending, if not to purchase, but to review the options on that website.

So it's just a type of insight that you can, you know, track your reports by combining these bent dimensions and metrics, right? But they're also used, not just in reports, but to create, in this case, filters, you know, to create events. We'll discuss events a little later, an audience, developing audiences, right? So here's an example, as I promised, to circle back to show how to define the parameter for internal traffic, the internal traffic filter. So let's go to that.

So we go to the admin section once again, and this time we're going to click on data streams and the data collection and modification section, and then click on the data stream. Then we click on the data stream that we want, and then we go to configure tag settings, which is right here under the Google tag area. So configure tag settings, and then just make sure that you click on show more on the settings on this page, and go down to and define internal traffic, right? So here you would click create, and now, you know, you give it a name, and the traffic type is eternal, and now you would simply just have to add your IP address.

So, IP address equals, IP address is a range, depending upon how you're uploading, you know, how you're going to represent the IP addresses, just add them there, and then press create, and you have your filter, right? So again, this step will be taken before you actually go to the data filter section on the admin section, and you'll turn the filter on. You first have to create the parameter for internal traffic, and then, you know, set the value for this parameter, and you're good to go.