Scope is one of the most easily misunderstood aspects of Google Analytics. Many articles explain scopes using diagrams like this:
Which in my opinion could confuse people even more.
So I’d like to present a different take in visualizing scopes － by using a spreadsheet. Everybody is familiar with a spreadsheet format:
Example:
In Google Analytics, you can visualize the spreadsheet as such:
Example of a browsing session, using just the hit-scoped Page dimension:
Ok so what about session-scoped dimensions? Here’s the visualizing trick, let’s introduce the session-scoped Landing Page:
Ah-ha! As you can see, session-scope value applies to all the “records” of the spreadsheet. If the user continues to navigate to a few more pages, the spreadsheet will look like this:
Ok what if you change the value of a session-scoped dimension? Let’s introduce a User Classification session-scoped custom dimension and go through a few examples. Let’s start off with empty value:
On the next hit, if you set value “A” to User Classification, it becomes:
On the next hit, if you set it to value “B”, it becomes:
In essence, session-scoped value applies to all the records in the same session.
Finally, when a new session starts (eg. user opens the website page again the next day):
That is, changes to session-scoped dimensions do not affect past sessions.
I hope this visualization technique is helpful for you. In future articles, I will touch on User scope (which is just a sticky version of session scope) and Product scope. I will also share some solution design consideration for session-scoped dimensions.
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