Browse Analytics
How explores, dimensions and metrics work
Every chart and dashboard in Kontala Analytics is built from the same three building blocks.
- An explore is where a question starts: one subject, such as visits, page views or carts, with its fields ready to use.
- A dimension describes something, such as a channel, a country or the time a visit started. You group and filter your results by dimensions.
- A metric measures something, such as visits, conversions or revenue. A metric summarises many rows into one number.
Kontala defines all three for you, in a semantic layer it maintains for your organisation, so every chart that uses a metric gets the same number.
One question, three building blocks
Take the question "How many visits did each channel bring each week, and what share of them converted?"
| Part of the question | Building block | What you pick |
|---|---|---|
| Visits, the subject of the question | Explore | Visits |
| How many visits | Metric | Visits |
| What share of them converted | Metric | Conversion rate |
| Each channel | Dimension | Channel |
| Each week | Dimension, at a time interval | Visit start, by Week |
You open the Visits explore, select the two dimensions and the two metrics, and run the query. Kontala returns one row for each combination of week and channel:
| Visit start week | Channel | Visits | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-28 | Organic Search | 4,210 | 2.9% |
| 2026-09-28 | Paid Search | 1,875 | 4.1% |
| 2026-10-05 | Organic Search | 4,388 | 3.0% |
| 2026-10-05 | Paid Search | 1,940 | 3.8% |
The figures are illustrative. To look at recent weeks only, you would add a filter on Visit start.
Dimensions describe, metrics measure
A quick test tells them apart: can you read the value from a single row?
- If you can, it is a dimension: a visit's channel, its landing page, whether it converted.
- If you need many rows to work it out, it is a metric: the number of visits, the conversion rate, the median days to convert.
The same information often appears as both. Converted is a dimension, true or false for each visit, which you can filter or group by. Converting visits is a metric: how many visits converted.
In the Explorer, dimensions are shown in blue and metrics in orange, both in the field list and in the results table.
Metrics are calculated for each group
A metric has no single fixed value. It is calculated for every combination of the dimensions in your query.
- Visits on its own returns one number.
- Add Channel and it returns one number per channel.
- Add Visit start by Week as well and it returns one number per channel per week.
Filters decide what goes into each calculation. A filter on a dimension removes rows before your metrics are calculated, for example visits that did not convert. A filter on a metric removes rows from your results after the metrics are calculated, for example channels with fewer than 100 visits.
Where the definitions come from
Kontala defines every explore, dimension and metric, each with a description, and keeps them the same for every organisation. Your Data Capture settings, such as page types and click types, flow into them when someone publishes changes. Explores, metrics and the semantic layer lists every explore and what it covers.
For a one-off question, you can add your own fields to a chart without changing the shared definitions:
- Bins, which group a number such as Days to convert into ranges.
- Custom metrics, such as the average of Pages in visit.
- Table calculations, such as each channel's share of all visits.
Next steps
- Explores: open an explore, then build, filter, sort and save a query.
- Dimensions: dimension types, dates and time intervals, filters and bins.
- Metrics: how metrics are calculated, custom metrics and table calculations.