Google Data Studio for Analytics: Widen session-scoped dimensions with page dimensions
Analytics scopes
One of the more complicated concept to adopt inside Google Analytics is dimensions and metrics scopes (User, Session, Hit, Product). Fortunately, there are a lot of documentations and articles explaining it in detail. Practices & data tests can also help you to overcome it.
But, when users are reading/designing their Google Analytics or Google Data Studio report, it is tempting to cross any field with any other, without taking care of related scopes.
After all, it is available and possible through the interface, so it should display consistent data, addressing my need…#FAIL…
Users must be aware about scopes limits, using fields that they know.
Google Data Studio opportunities
On the other hand, Google Analytics data schema is customizable and rich of data fields, covering interactions and related data context. Yes, it is hard-linked to scopes for data computing/aggregation purposes, but data are available, and simple Google Data Studio features can help us to enhance reports beyond a part of scopes limits.
Let’s widen session-scoped dimensions with page-scoped dimensions. The principle described below can be applied to any case widening a higher level of scope with a lower one.
Use case: Conversion rate by landing page title
We wish to create a report displaying landing page and related conversion rate (session scope). But paths of landing pages, available through the Google Analytics dimension “Landing page” (session scope), are not readable and friendly for my Data Studio users.
On the other and “Page title” dimension is providing for each page a user friendly page name, related to each page path through the “Page” dimension. But Page and Page title are hit-scoped dimensions and crossing them with session-scoped conversion rate is not consistent.
So, let’s just blend data between our 2 scopes to widen session-scoped report with a conversion table made with hit-scoped dimensions, using the same Google Analytics data source.
…another kind of use case, solved with simple data blending…
Data blending and chart creation
Follow the steps below to create your chart displaying conversion rate by landing page title:
- Create a session-scoped table chart with Landing page, e-commerce conversion rate, Sessions, sorted by sessions DESC and limited to 5 rows
- Create a page-scoped table chart with Page, Page title sorted by entrances DESC and limited to 5 rows
- Optional step: Clean page title with filters to get only one title by page path (if your page title has been changed, preventing duplicate lines because of left join data source blended)
- Select the session-scoped table that contains our targeted metrics, then the page-scoped table corresponding to our conversion table from page path to page title ; and right click it to blend data
- Edit blended data source:
- Left join Landing page with Page and remove all other join keys
- Select Page title as dimension from the page-scoped data source instance and rename it “Landing page title”
- Check that the session-scoped data source contains conversion rate and sessions as metrics
- Save
- Change your blended data chart to display Landing page title and related conversion rates
- Customize our chart following the wished visualisation result, using sessions metrics to sort it by descending sessions
You will find below a full video summing-up scope mistake and applying the solution described above.