What is Scope in Google Analytics?

The scope is a characteristic of dimension or metric which defines the way Google Analytics classifies that specific dimension or metric.

* Each dimension or metric can have only one scope.

Dimension:

these types of data make the descriptive aspects. Such as: Page, Landing Page, City, Device Category, and Source / Medium are all dimensions. 

Metric:

Metrics are the measurements made against these dimensions. Things like sessions, page-views, and bounce rate are all metrics.

There are 4 levels of scope available:

• User
• Session
• Hit
• Product

User Scope:

As we know, Google Analytics uses the client id to verify “users” on your website. When the user scoped dimension is used, it is taken once per user till the time the value has changed and will be used for future sessions.

Example: Just imagine that we want to figure out how many people have actually subscribed to our blog. We want to collect this information only once per user so that is why we want to use the user scope. At the start, the user is classified as not subscribed. Once the user subscribes to our blog, the user will be classified as a subscriber for all future sessions.

Pre-built dimensions on user-level within Google Analytics are: Age, Gender Affinity category 

Session Scope:

 Groups the component hits throughout one viewing session. This will track a full “session” as a time a user enters the site until they leave, with all subsequent hits within it.

Source & medium these are two demission session scope. When a visitor lands on the website from the organic search result page, the source within dimension will collect this data and attribute it to google/organic. However, when the visitor comes back three days later from an email campaign (new session), this time Google Analytics will classify the medium for this session as email.

Hit Scope:

As a website user, all stops you make on a website make up your total hits. When navigating on a website, any page you explore in your user journey is a hit. Hits are made up of actions such as page-views and events.

Example:  a page-view of a homepage would be a hit. Any action that is set up as an event in Google Analytics would register as a hit. So, if there is event tracking set up to fire when a user clicks on a CTA(Call to Action), this would register as a hit.

Product Scope:

Product scope analytic use y e-commerce website. Suppose If we want to see if visitors are adding products to the cart from the lister page or product detail page, we need to create a product scope custom dimension in order to get the data we want. Similarly, we want to assign a new product category to our products so we need to create a product scoped custom dimension to do so.

Example: We want to figure out what products are mostly added to the cart from the product detail page and what products are mostly added from the lister page. However, we will create it as a metric because we want to know the amount of times visitors add certain products to the cart either from the product detail page or from the lister page.

Summary of Scope in google analytics

? If we want to know a certain value just once per user, we will set up a custom dimension as user scope.

 For example:

• Subscribed user
• User_id
• Registered user

? If we want to know the information once per session, we will use session scope

• The device used for the particular session
• Source or medium used for the session
• Landing page

? If we want to know the value with each hit, we will use hit scope

• Language version of the current page
• Page title
• Search query

? If we want to add an additional dimension to our product, we need to use product scope

• Add to carts from the product detail page vs lister page
• Product brand
• Product SKU
• Product List name

Important note: Remember that Google Analytics recognizes users based on client id so if a user deletes or cleans the cookies then this visitor is tracked as a new user. If that’s the case, it means that one real user can be counted twice or more times with certain dimensions.