21 Sep 2020
21 Sep 2020
Nowadays, marketing is more than general broadcasting. Modern tech-based strategies are data-driven, and you need to target to prevent spending resources on unfocused campaigns accurately.
So, if you create a website or are into digital marketing and want to sell your brand, you must use strategies to target specific buyers. In that case, you first require qualified data from the targeted buyers to identify their needs.
Data is the key to most decision-making processes, as people get much information from data classification and analysis. Google Analytics, provided by Google since 2005, tracks all clicks and posts when running the internet.
It is used for tracking website activity like session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, etc. Once you add a tracking code to a website, Google automatically tracks, stores and records the data.
One can use Google's built-in tools to create reports from the data or to incorporate Google Adwords and search consoles. Finally, the digital marketing executive integrates it with Google ads to use it to nail a user's online behaviour.
As per a study conducted in 2008, more than 60 per cent of the largest websites use Google analytics to determine their performance to target potential customers.
Google Analytics reports are based on two important things-
Dimensions and Matrix
Since 2012 the implementation of new features like multi-platform tracking, easy-to-handle tracking code for collecting data from different devices, and customisation of dimensions and metrics has made Google analytics more refined and more useful for individuals and organisations.
Marketers and analysts use it to determine a successful marketing strategy. Therefore, various technical terms besides matrix and dimensions are used in the Google matrix. More details about the dimension and matrix are given below-
Bounce And Bounce Rate
If the user returns without clicking the visited websites, it generates a bounce rate.
Exits And Exit Rate
It is a rate that denotes the number of times visitors have left a site from a single page.
Goal Conversion Rate
It tracks the percentage of visitors who stay or are returning to check out your website.
In this digitally-powered world, everything is going digital day by day.
As companies are online, so do customer and marketing professionals. And when we talk about digital, our conversation starts with "GOOGLE".
The number of users who browse websites on Chrome have a Gmail account, use Google Play, and access YouTube, BlogSpot, Google Drive, and Google analytics continues to grow yearly.
Here we will focus on Google Analytics:-
Google Analytics is data-driven software offered by Google. It allows the site to record individuals'/companies' responses on a web page and store data to get in-depth details about the visitors' responses to their websites. It is a free automatic tool.
The data is further used to know the age, gender, interest, device, and location of the audience. Furthermore, you may opt for a customised report which will be more specific.
Even internal search results, like what the users are doing on your website, can be obtained by choosing some settings. Moreover, as the digital world is evolving more and more, various platforms are there for customers and users to do various activities online.
Google Analytics helps to understand which platform you can use to target your potential customer. Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter, YouTube, Reedit, and numerous other platforms get user subscriptions, and the number of visitors continues to grow year on such sites.
Choosing the right platform for your advertisement is crucial, and Google Analytics helps achieve that.
The data-centric reports are created on Dimensions and Metrics based on Google analytics. These two terms are often used when preparing automatic or customised reports through Google Analytics. Details about them are as follows:-
Dimensions
As we know, dimensions are the minimum number of coordinates required to make a specific pattern, like a one-dimensional line, and a cube, a three-dimensional structure.
The same logic applies while positioning Google analytics. So what are the main points you need to put your analysis data into dimension? In other words, dimension is the attributes of the data you prepare.
Dimensions cannot be static - it keeps changing. Browser, Exit Page, Screens, and Session Duration are some examples of dimensions in the Google analytics context. Moreover, different people can have different data sets.
Matrix
Matrix is the Quantitative measurement of the data represented in Percentage, Number value, Time, Currency, etc. and used for measuring a website's performance at any given time.
For example, anyone who owns a website wants to know what per cent of people are accessing the websites through which mediums. Then the number of users in value or percentage and the duration of their average usage are created into a matrix of the Device Category dimension.
There are many metrics, like behaviour-related, acquisition-related, conversion-related, etc. The matrix measures the performance of any website based on the Bounce Rate, Exit Rate, Session Duration, Transactions, Revenue, No. of new users, etc.
Below are some examples of Google Analytics Dimensions:
1. Source / Medium:
The most commonly used custom dimensions in Google Analytics affect the source or Medium. It records how people on your site use organic and Google methods.
2. Client ID:
It provides client IDs and "secret" options that one can customise according to customer dimensions. The Cid can identify the visitors and see what they were checking out on your website. Also, one can see the data to set up end-to-end analytics to notice what each was doing on the website.
3. User Behavior or "Hits":
It is used for the user's product that offers the option of registration and logging in via Twitter, email, and Facebook.
4. Engaged Users:
When many individuals visit your website, they fully perform the first action of clicking on certain navigation options on the page. The dimension tracks the active users and helps identify how to influence the overall experience to enhance engagement.
5. Filled Out a Form:
Lead generation, where you fill out a registration form, helps markets identify the high-demand areas to design customer-centric communications. Registered data is processed by innovative analytics tools that enable marketers to create highly targeted campaigns.
6. Language or Location:
Google Analytics can be used to get the user's location and language.
7. Payload Length:
You can send the payload length via a hit in Google Analytics by adding just one tag of each type via hit-scope to the custom dimension via your container.
8. Leads by Piece of Content:
When you use leads to fetch your company's website through the backend via Google Analytics, then at a point, you identify the constraints, and it helps to move forward.
Google Analytics serves all businesses where the website can see if the visitor is a new user or someone who visited a few hours, days or months back. In addition, it provides the service to see how their website performs as a service.
In Google Analytics, metrics are incorporated in various ways so that Google Analytics is delivered through metrics to correctly affect the number of people visiting your website every month.
Through this method, you can see the number of metrics in each dimension.
There are some important things for metrics in Google Analytics:
1. Source:
Matrix is considered an important source. It offers the easiest way to measure searches by source and see how website traffic is generated.
2. Page Views Vs Unique Page Views:
You can get the data related to a new user page view through Google Analytics, and the user gets more attention, affecting every session on a single page in many ways.
3. Average Time On Page:
The average time spent on a page influences page stats. For example, if new users spend a lot of time on your page, it indicates the page has relevant content for its users.
4. Entrances:
In any matrix, the first page is visited by the API Explorer. Then the user is directed to your website, so the dock page must have clear and valid content to hold the user's attention for longer to prevent a bounce.
5. Bounce Rate:
It measures the number of sessions where the users left the page without further action.
6. Exit percentage:
The percentage is calculated from the number of visitors coming to the site. It measures the visitors who were last in the session, whereas bounce rate is the per cent calculated from only those users who were one of the sessions.
7. Locations:
With Google Analytics, you can use this data as a filter by looking at other sections.
8. Device Usage:
It is important to get a breakdown of the device use of visitors visiting your site.
Secondary dimensions help in sorting and classifying data, and it is used often. The secondary dimension in Google analytics provides a deeper insight into your data. Google Analytics provides many different reports, each with detailed information about the performance of a specific dimension.
Secondary dimensions help you get the reports which can be used to determine future marketing campaigns. You need to check the secondary dimensional drop-down to find out which sources people are landing on which page.
So as you start typing the source and select the Medium of source option, it will show you the exact source from where visitors land on which page; for instance, most people land on their homepage via organic results and then are directed to other pages.
A page can get you an engagement or bounce rate; you need to look at the ad word traffic that sends visitors to your page to see where you get the bounce rate. Once again, it would be difficult to figure this out without looking into the analytics report.
Getting visitors to your site is one thing, but holding on and nurturing them to fill in the registration form or get a CTA can be complex; you want them to complete an action such as filling in a booking form, asking for quotes, or downloading a coupon right now. Therefore, you must see the conversion rate.
To check your conversion performance, select the option from the left side menu, click on goals and select overview. You should see a message telling you to set a goal, which you need to do.
If the page address is case-sensitive, ignore the value and the funnel option to keep things simple.
Nowadays, it is unthinkable to run a business without an online presence. Luckily Google Analytics helps you to steer your business in the right direction. It is your true business ally, and it's free.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that every business owner should use daily. However, the downside is that it can be a very complex and overwhelming experience for anyone using it for the first time.
Once you sign in, you will see an overview of the performance of your website. Unfortunately, most of you can only access the data on one website.
There are two different default dimensions - custom dimensions and custom metrics. The scope in custom metric has only two choices hit or product.
You can follow the convention to keep track of the indexes of your variables. You get multiple choices when you select the variables you want to put in.
Google Analytics also compares two months and develops the result into graphs. You can also find a detailed performance breakdown for each indicator you have covered.
To find out where most of your traffic comes from, click on the acquisition in the left-hand side menu and select the overview option.
To see how powerful this is, go to the acquisition repost on the left-hand side and then click on overview and straightaway, you can see which channel is bringing you the most of your conversion, which is yet another highly valuable piece of information that will help you get a better decision. So you understand how powerful it is.
Regarding Google Analytics, Metrics and Dimensions is the essential part that works as the building blocks. It also helps to improve the traffic data through analysis, organisation, and segment. Now let's have a look at how distinctively these two work and the difference between metrics and dimensions:-
Dimensions:
While you must properly organise, classify, describe, and sort your data, the dimensions are key parameters. For example, some dimensions include the category of device, browser, language, Medium, country, and campaign.
The most important part is that each of these dimensions embraces various values; moreover, there are three dimensions: primary, secondary and custom.
Primary dimensions are also known as default dimensions. For example, "Device Category" helps to sort your data conveniently through mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Whereas "Browser" is a secondary dimension allowing you to review every device's browsing experience.
Apart from using default dimensions, some Google Analytics users prefer custom dimensions. With the help of these redesigned and creative dimensions, you can easily measure and collect all data that wouldn't be tracked automatically using any tools.
Metrics:
Regarding Google Analytics, Metrics represent numerical values such as time, %, $, the value of numbers, etc. These are quantitative data measurements along with the performance of your websites.
Examples of metrics:- Usually, there are three types of metrics that you can see, including Behavior, Conversions, and Acquisition metrics.
Behaviour-related metrics which grouped into Bounce Rate, Exit Rate, Pages/Session, and Session Duration.
Conversion-related metrics are grouped into Transactions, E-commerce Conversion Rate, and Revenue.
Acquisition-related metrics which grouped into Users, New Users, and Sessions.
In Google Analytics, Custom dimensions work just like default dimensions, where you don't have to make it yourself. Instead, there are professionals for it. To capture and quantify information that cannot map automatically, GA users like to use customised ones instead of default dimensions:
For example, all information consists of a CRM or Customer Relation Management system.
For e-commerce owners who can verify data points, such as the unpurchased cumulative quantity of goods in a cart or the disparity in the actions of logged-in guest users, such actions at this stage are very technical, and Google has a detailed set of specifications and configuration choices to implement personalised dimensions into your account.
There are a few steps which you need to follow for custom dimensions, including,
First, you have to sign in to Google Analytics.
Then click on the option Admin to choose the right property per your requirement.
Fill in the property column; you need to click on Custom Definitions.
After that, select and click on the New Custom Dimension.
Then add or give a unique name.
Now select the option of scope to develop product level, user, session, etc.
After that, for data collecting purposes, check the active box appropriately.
When all these steps are done, click on the creation option.
In the field of study, you must check several variables in the GA stats report. Therefore, reports from GA contain dimensions as well as metrics.
Metrics are the terms used when representing data in most GA reports or, more simply and often, represented by numerical values, including number value, percentage value, time, dollars, etc.
Compared to metrics, dimensions are represented by non-numerical values. Nevertheless, these two are considered the building blocks of Google Analytics data.
One has maximum freedom of choosing between dimensions and metrics to put in each report, to create a custom report in Google Analytics or Google Data Studio to get an extensive report.
Hopefully, this above article will clarify all the queries related to the topic Dimensions in Google Analytics.