What is the difference between metrics and dimensions?

If you’re new to analytics or training a client who is, don’t skip over the basics. For example, understanding the difference between metrics and dimensions is one of the building blocks of web analytics. When we think of creating a marketing dashboard or campaign report, a lot of thought is often put into which metrics or measures we want to include in the report. Measures of what, though?

Dimensions, on the other hand, are attributes or descriptors. Dimensions themselves don't include numerical values other than dates, but they can be counted in situations where that makes sense. One way in which this could occur is that you want to get a list of the activity links that exist on a particular page. The activity link itself is a dimension since it is a descriptor. The value for that activity link is going to be a string. There may be a need at some point to count how many instances a particular activity link is clicked. In that situation, you would do just that: You would perform a COUNT of the number of activity links. In a data visualization tool such as Domo, you would bring that dimension in as a column in a table, and then you would select how to handle the data and set it up as a COUNT on the activity link dimension. This would tell you how many times that link was clicked on.

Dimensions include page names, page URLs, referring domains, countries, cities, exit links, campaign names or any other element of the tracking codes, types of users such as registered or not registered or subscription status such as the good, better, or best version of your subscription. If you work in an ecommerce business, they could include the names of your products or the categories of them. As mentioned earlier, you can do a count of these values, but the raw values of these attributes are descriptive, not numerical.

Metrics refer to numerical values. They could be a SUM of something, a COUNT, or a ratio of some sort, e.g. a percentage. Also called measures in web analytics, they commonly deal with these items: page views visits, unique visitors, bounces, bounce rate, average time on site, page depth, pages per visit, new visitors or returning visitors.

Have you received any questions about dimensions and metrics in your discussions with clients? What were those questions?