Are You Measuring What Matters? What Dimensions and Attributes Mean For You

Running a business is hard, every day presenting new challenges or fires you need to quelch. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details, however, how can you look strategically at what is happening at a high level when you are constantly in the weeds? It takes discipline and understanding the importance of the details. Like market research, analyzing dimensions and attributes can help you make better decisions for your business now and in the future.

You are already at some level focused on certain measures contributing to your business such as sales and revenue. Additionally, you probably know your products and customers well. These are the dimensions that are housed in your measures. Dimensions offer you a way to extract certain information from your overall measures (sales, revenue) in order to access important data to help you refine your strategy. There is a relationship between the dimensions and the measures whereas the data that makes up your sales can contain additional helpful information. This data is what you would call an attribute.

Attributes are a way of “describing” the data by providing characteristics of that dimension. Examples of attributes can include the geographic region, description, origin, or source of the data such as where you purchased your product from, what channel the customer sale originated from, etc. When you organize your data, you can then analyze different attributes and see how they contribute to your overall business successes or challenges. In the example below, you can break out your sales data into a spreadsheet so that you can further analyze it. Let’s say your sales of products 2 and 3 are higher than product 1. Organizing your measures can help you drill down to determine if geography, quality or your promotional channel need further consideration.

Customer behavior is rapidly changing with the onset of the COVID pandemic and movement to online commerce. Taking some time to organize your measures can help you to be nimbler in adapting to economic hiccups. The COVID pandemic has created an 8th entry point opening up more opportunities caused by “The Diderot Effect.” By organizing your analysis by ensuring that your has the right attributes, you can be more efficient in your analysis make smarter decisions while shedding light on new opportunities.