What Metric-Dimension Combination is not Valid in Digital Marketing?

Google Analytics is a free service which is provided by the parent company Google, which helps you to understand user activity, behavior, and website traffic to infer its performance.

It also helps to analyze the content on your website, which works and which does not; what brings more engagement and what does not.

It provides easy access to all this information, and clubbed with a lot more features it is a very helpful tool for checking the performance of your website and making sure that it reaches its highest potential. 

1. Google Analytics for Digital Marketing

There are four segments with which you can understand this.

• The audience helps you understand your target audience and also provides you with details like their location, demographics, device knowledge, and retention rate. This gives you a clear picture of the results of your marketing, and how targeted marketing works. 
• The acquisition makes you understand how your user ends up on your website. It tells which channels were most effective, whether was it organic traffic or social media help. It makes you monitor your work on different social media platforms, determine how your search engine optimization is helping and help you to tweak them according to your desired results. 
• Behavior explains your customer’s activity on your site. Which pages were visited, what was the average time spent, Providing you information about engagement and retention of the viewers? 
• Conversions track if the users are taking the steps that they desire. Example – If the purchases are happening or not. If they are not then what steps in the entire funnel need to be fixed? 

2. What are the Metrics on Google Analytics?

Measurement of the website activity by the users is done by the use of metrics. It provides you with data that helps you to understand the engagement of people with your website.

It helps to analyze your performance and also helps you get a clear view of which data is attracting most of your audience. 

Google Analytics has these metrics, which provide you with adequate data to monitor the above.

Given the data and statistics, you can now make tweaks or improvements based on surveyed results, and gradually your site will perform better. 

3. The Top Three Metrics of Google Analytics 

• Traffic and Traffic sources – Clearly as the name suggests it helps you understand your overall website traffic. How many people are visiting, how are they getting directed there and how good are your marketing campaigns performing? 
•  Bounce Rate – Bounce means moving from one place to another, so bounce rate states how many users bounce to some other website from yours, without even visiting the second page. This usually happens when the total user experience is not good or the website optimization takes time. 
• Conversion Rate – This tells you how many conversions happened on your website. Implying how many times did you achieve the desired target which will be variable depending on what is the type of product/service that your website is offering. 

4. What are the Dimensions of Google Analytics?

There are five key metrics on Google Analytics, and one of them is dimensions. Dimensions allow you to get a better view of your data by providing it to you in smaller form, which is more specific about different factors affecting your business.

This helps you to understand the different categories more elaborately and make data-driven changes accordingly.

Some examples of how dimensions facilitate – They tell you about the channel traffic, and which channel is getting the most and which least.

What is the average time duration that a user spends on your site, Which pages are creating organic traffic, which are not etc? 

5. The Three Main Dimensions of Google Analytics 

• Users – users tell the number of visitors on your website, their whereabouts like where they were from, and their activity on the site. 
• Pages – pages are the dimension that tells you the activity of the different pages of your website, which had the highest traffic and which lowest. 
• Devices – as the name suggests, devices tell you the device which was used by the viewers to access your site. 

6. What is Metric-Dimension Combination in Google Analytics?

How Google Analytics works on the input is a combination of dimensions and metrics which means that it is a collaboration of quantitative and descriptive approaches; dimension provides the descriptive part and the numerical part is provided by metrics.

The total number of pages viewed in a session is the part provided by the metrics, for which the corresponding dimension would be the URL that is being viewed. 

Now we know that there are different combinations of metric dimensions in Google Analytics, we have to understand that not all of these are valid.

The software itself will not let the user create an invalid combination; however, in some cases that may not be true. 

7. What Metric Dimension Combination is not Valid?

There are two main reasons why a metric-dimension combination may not be valid; the first is when the data types are incompatible with each other.

So, if you combine duration metrics with a country source it will be invalid as these two formats are not compatible. 

Second, when the data has a high volume Google Analytics tends to perform sampling on the data, which means that a sample of the entire thing is picked up for the analysis, now it might be possible that the metric combination which was valid for the entire data set is not valid for the sample. 

Considering the above, the answer to this question is sessions/bounce rate is not a valid metric dimension combination. 

8. Final Thoughts 

In conclusion, we can say there are both valid and invalid combinations, and because all invalid combinations exist due to sampling and incompatibility and do not provide the required analysis.

It does not mean that all valid combinations will be meaningful. The key to understanding this is the context of your data, the required analysis and then choosing the most appropriate combinations.