Measures, Attributes, and Dimensions

There are three common components within Customer Insights Analytics subject areas: measures, attributes, and dimensions.

Measures and attributes are data elements that you use to build your visualizations. Dimensions are simply categories or folders that contain attributes.

You can think of a measure as a "numerator" with a quantitative number that can be divided or filtered by an attribute. Conversely, an attribute is a "denominator" that can divide or filter a measure. Or you can think of a measure as a quantity for the y-axis of a graph, and an attribute as a value used on the x-axis of a graph. Both elements are used to dissect and analyze your data in different ways.

See the examples below for more information about how you can use attributes and measures together to create visualizations.

Example 1: Households by Income Level

One common measure in Opower Analytics Visualization is household count, which can be found in the Household - Count of Customers subject area. Let's say you want to know the number of households in your service area that have a certain income level. You would want to filter the number of households in your service territory into income level groupings.

To do this, you would navigate to the Household - Count of Customer subject area. Then you would select Household Count as your measure, and select Income Level (available in the Demographics dimension folder) as your attribute, and drag both to the canvas. See the screenshot below for how this might look in the user interface. Notice that Household Count is on the y-axis and Income Level is on the x-axis.

Example 2: Total Usage by Appliance (Electric Heating)

Another measure you can filter on is the Total Usage measure available in the Appliance - Usage Insights subject area. For example, let's say you want to know the total energy usage of a single appliance, such as electric heating.

In this case, you would navigate to the Appliance - Usage Insights subject area. Then you would select Total Usage as your measure, and select Appliance as your attribute, and drag both to the canvas. You would then need to right-click the Appliance attribute and create a filter to only include Electric Heating. See the screenshot below for an example of how this might look.

Note about Attributes Filtering Attributes

Note that an attribute cannot be used to filter another attribute. For example, let's say you wanted to create a x-y axis bar graph with two attributes: Site Sections and Income Level. This would be a nonsensical filter because site sections are just names for different sections of a website, and income level groupings are just names for different categories of income. Neither of these attributes has a quantity, and so there would be no numerical value to show.