There's not even an iota of doubt that Google Analytics is one of the most popular and strongest tracking tools available in today's technological world. But what makes it one of the top tracking contenders out there?
1) The brand name "Google" itself has a lot of value. You can rest assured that Google leaves no stone unturned when they come out with a new product considering they have their brand name and equity at stake. From marketing to delivering the actual performance product, they have managed to live up to the user expectations almost every time.
2) They use a combination of metrics and dimensions to stand apart.
Now the bigger question arises: What is the difference between metrics and dimensions?
Dimensions are the kinds of things you would see in the rows of a Google Analytics report. For example, language is a dimension — you can even see a whole report with rows and rows of language preferences. Browser preference is a dimension. Campaign is a dimension. “Page” (aka request URL) is a dimension. You can find all those things as the titles of rows in Google Analytics reports.
Metrics, on the other hand, are the numbers that usually populate those rows. So you might have a City report, and it gives you rows with the names of cities that visitors came from, but it also gives you metrics: how many visits per city, what the average time on site per city was, what the bounce rate per city was, and so forth.
Comparing a simple example:
Let's take a simple example of visitors on a website.
- Measuring the number of visitors on your website for a specified time period is a metric. Google Analytics accomplishes this task by using a pre-defined variable "ga.visitors" where ga stands for Google Analytics.
- Similarly a dimension in this case would be a boolean to indicate if a visitor is a new or returning visitor. It is defined using "ga.visitorType". It can have 2 possible values - New Visitor or Returning Visitor.
Either ways, metrics and dimensions form an integral part of Google Analytics as 'Dimensions describe data whereas Metrics measure data.' Simple, isn't it?
