Metrics is Customer Data Platform (CDP)’s Analytics reporting solution that can be used to analyze data by building reports and visualizations. Besides tabular format, the output of any Metrics report can also be visualized and analyzed in numerous chart views. Over 100+ out-of-the-box, pre-calculated dimensions make Metrics a powerful business intelligence solution.
Metrics is built on the industry-leading BI and Analytics platform, Looker. So, if you’re an expert at Looker, you’re already an expert at CDP Metrics! On occasion, this documentation will have links to Looker’s documentation for additional depth and details on the feature.
Note
Exploring the data starts with building a report based on the insight, followed by adding the visualization to the results of the report.
To build a report, you need two elements called dimensions and measures. A dimension is the way to group or categorize the data you are exploring and a measure is the numerical value or information about that bucket of data that you wish to analyze. Examples of dimensions are dates (buckets of weeks, months, and years), customer segments, product categories or states.
Measures are values that are summed, averaged, or counted. For example, total revenue, order count, and buyer count.
The following example shows the sales performance of a retail company. It displays the total revenue and customer count evolution in the past two years. For this, we select the dimension to be Transaction Transaction Month and measures to be Transaction Total Revenue and Transaction Buyer Count. In this case, the sum of all revenue and sum of buyer count are grouped together by months.
To use Metrics:
Metrics can take the form of either a Look, which is the result set and visualization of a data exploration, or a Dashboard, which is a collection of data visualizations. The content is saved into Spaces, which can include Looks and Dashboards.
You can organize looks and dashboards in folders. Note that you can create folders up to three levels.
On the screen, Spaces that are previously saved by the users are listed on the left side. When you navigate to a Space, any Looks and Dashboards within that Space are listed on the right side of the screen.