How metrics work

Every number in Rankrake, on a dashboard or through the SDK, is a metric computed over the events your site sends: visits, clicks, recommendations shown, items added to the cart, orders.

Metrics are grouped in three categories:

• Commerce: orders, revenue and conversion, and what recommendations earned.
• Recommendations: how often recommendations are shown and clicked.
• Traffic: visits and visitors, how long they last and how much they browse.

Shaping a metric

The same metric answers different questions depending on how you ask for it:

• Date range: the period the metric covers. The end of the range can’t be in the future.
• Granularity: leave it out for one number over the whole range, or ask for one value per a number of hours or days (for example 1 day, or 7 days for weekly) to draw a trend. Days are UTC days.
• Filters: keep only part of the data, for example one site, one category or only order lines that came from a recommendation.
• Breakdown (group by): split the metric by an attribute, for example revenue by recommendation placement, with a limit on how many groups to return.

Which attributes can filter or break down a metric depends on its category; the attributes page lists them.

Things to know

• Currencies are not converted. Revenue metrics add up amounts as they were sold. A store selling in more than one currency should filter or break down by currency.
• A breakdown can count something twice. An item in two categories counts under both when you break down by category, so the groups can add up to more than the total. Filtering by category never double counts.
• Rates are not averages of rates. A conversion rate over a week is computed from the week’s orders and visits, not by averaging the daily rates.