A Consumer’s Guide to Understanding Data - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 62

These three concepts (elements, dimensions, and metrics) begin to explain
how data tables and charts are constructed and can be analyzed. A straight-
forward way to understand most data is to:
1. Filter elements by dimensions to create a scope that is relevant. For exam-
ple, limit results for data collected in the last 30 days.
2. Summarize the metrics by adding or averaging all the values of the ele-
ments. For example, average jump height.
3. Break out the metrics by dimensions to see the characteristics where that
value is unexpectedly high or low. For example, average jump height
broken out by species.
Most analyses are that simple: Filter by relevant dimensions; summarize metrics;
and breakout by dimensions. Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics
may seem complex (Figure 4-13), but they are basically giving you ways to
choose metrics and break them out by dimensions.
Figure 4-13 Dashboard from Google Analytics