What is a dimension in google analytics ?

Dimension in google analytics

This is what characterizes a visitor, for example, the visitor’s geographical origin, the version of his browser. It can also be one of the aspects of the traffic entering the site, its source, its origin.

Here is an example list of dimensions on google analytics :

• Medium
• Browser
• Country
• Language
• Campaign
• Device Category

Each dimension has its own characteristics. In the example below, the browser dimension indicates the type of browser used to visit a website. We can see here that the browser dimension takes 6 values (Chrome, Safari in-app, Safari, Samsung Internet, Android Webview and Firefox)

Primary and secondary dimensions

Each GA report comes with a pre-selected core dimension that provides a high-level overview of the dimension’s performance against a set of metrics.

In most reports, a complete list of dimensions can be viewed by clicking on “Other” in the Main Dimension menu and scrolling the drop-down option. To change the main dimension, users can choose the most relevant one from the list of all available options.

Custom Dimensions

In addition to using default dimensions, GA users can create custom dimensions to collect and measure data that the tool would not automatically track, for example, information stored in a customer relationship management system that can be synchronized with GA data. Custom dimensions are particularly relevant for e-commerce owners, who can examine data points such as the total value of non-purchased items in a shopping cart or the difference in behavior of logged-in customers versus guest customers.

Difference between dimensions and statistics

Although dimensions and statistics are the characteristics of visitors to your website, they are different in the way they are: configured, collected, processed, reported and queried in Google Analytics.

For example, the users metric is meaningless in itself and only makes sense when used with a dimension as a source, support, user type, country, etc.

In contrast to the dimensions, the statistics are listed in the following three categories in Google Analytics:

• Acquisition: How visitors arrive on your website
• Behavior: How visitors interact with your website
• Conversions: how visitors made conversions on your website

Some examples of dimensions in google analytics

Device category : It is a dimension of Google Analytics that determines the device used for each session: computer, tablet or laptop. This dimension is useful when you want to analyze the performance of your site on these 3 types of devices.

Previous page path : This is a Google Analytics dimension indicating the navigation page preceding the page you are viewing. This dimension is useful for reviewing the internal navigation of users on your site.

Conversion : Google Analytics records a conversion each time the visitor achieves one of the previously defined objectives, or makes an e-commencement purchase.

CTA (Call-To-Action) : It is a means of encouraging the Internet user to perform an action. This term could be translated as “inciting action” or “call to action”. A call to action is often characterized by a large, clearly visible button with the name of the action to be performed.

CTR (Click Through Rate) : It is a method of determining the effectiveness of an advertising campaign based on the number of clicks on the ads and the number of page views.

Event : The event is triggered when a user performs an arbitrary action or a specific interaction that you want to track. For example, launching a video present on your site. These interactions are sent to Google Analytics in the form of events, with a maximum of 3 dimensions (category, action, and optionally label), and static (optional), as the value of the event. Events can also be used to set goals.

Page : In Google Analytics reports, the page is the path to the page of your website, i.e. the part of the URL after the domain name. If your site is hosted on multiple domains or subdomains, it can be used to create filters on this view to modify the reported page to include it in the host name.

Source  : Along with the supports and campaigns, it is one of the 3 main dimensions to analyze the origin of the users of your site. The source is subordinate to the support. For example, the possible sources are the following: “Google” (name of a search engine), “instagram.com” (name of a referent site), “newsletter gaming” (name of one of your newsletters).

If you need more information on a particular dimension I advise you to go to the support of google analytics available via this link : https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033861?hl=en

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