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Combining item-scoped dimensions and event-scoped metrics in analytics
Hey, so I’m trying to wrap my head around these schema changes Google has made. Apparently item-scoped dimensions and event-scoped metrics aren’t compatible now.
I’ve been using “itemViewEvents” which is event-scope metric and “itemName” which is item-scoped dimension to find out how many views a product got. So, can I still get those numbers after this update? I was thinking maybe I need to come up with a custom metric or dimension, but I’m not really sure. What do you think?
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2 Replies
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Yes, you’re on the right track. The updated schema change by Google just means that item-scoped dimensions (like “itemName”) and event-scoped metrics (like “itemViewEvents”) can no longer be queried together directly. But you can still get the information you need.
As an alternative to using a Custom Metric or Dimension, you can use the ‘event’ and ‘items’ fields in GA4. The ‘event’ field now represents all the user interactions (like ‘itemViewEvents’) and the ‘items’ field represents all the product-related data. The items’ field beings an array, stores the product data individually, with each item in the array representing a unique product. Now, if you want to check how many views a product got, you can map ‘itemName’ with respective ‘eventName’ which is equivalent to ‘itemViewEvents’. It might require a little bit of extra data manipulation, but you can definitely pull out the numbers you need.
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After the update, you can’t directly pair “itemViewEvents” and “itemName” anymore because they fall into different scopes. However, you can definitely create a custom metric or dimension that wraps around these two so you can still analyze how many views a particular product got. It’s a bit complex, but definitely doable!
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