There are a few places in TapClicks where you will be asked to select a data view. The most common among these is when creating widgets on a dashboard. After selecting a data source, called a "data category" in the widget creation interface, you will need to choose from a dropdown list of data views.
Like most users, you may ask yourself, what is a data view? This article answers that question.
What is a data view?
Data Views are a way of organizing data to help you make business decisions.
Here is a simplified way of thinking about Data Views using playing cards as an analogy:
Let's pretend you want to connect your Facebook Ads account to TapClicks. Imagine that all the data available from the Facebook API is represented by a deck of playing cards. Now think of each specific card in the deck as representing a field from that data source (CPM, impressions, clicks, etc).
You can group these cards so that you have all of the red cards together. You can also group them based on the number on the face of the card. Each of these options is a way of organizing the cards based on a common trait.
Think of Data Views as a means of grouping the data fields. Just like playing cards, each field has multiple pieces of information. Some of this information is simply a number. It might be the count of clicks on a particular ad. We refer to that as a Metric. Another piece of information, using the card analogy, is if the card is an Ace or a face card, like a King or Queen. Those have some additional value, other than purely the number. We might refer to these as Dimensions or Attributes. Common Dimensions you'll see include Campaign, Ad, Site, and Pixel. Dimensions are aspects of the data that provide more context than simply the number. You may want to group things by their Campaign, for example.
TapClicks takes data from the Data Source and organizes it into Data Views for several reasons:
- Data views help users derive insight from the data.
- Not all fields work well together in reporting or analysis.
- There is a limitation on how certain data is served from the source.
What Data Sets are Used to Create Data Views?
Metrics
- number fields, performance indicators
- Examples: Impressions, Cost, CTR
Dimensions
- Fields that will add more granularity to your data. When a dimension is added, typically the number of rows in the response will increase, one for each of your dimension types.
- Examples: Campaign, Ad, Site, Pixel, Action
Attributes
- Similar to dimensions, but attributes don’t add granularity. Instead, they describe a dimension.
- Examples: Campaign Start Date, Ad Size, Target