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Web Analytics Domain

Note: Web Analytics is modelled as a channel and measurement area within the Sales & Marketing domain, not as a separate top-level organizational domain, following the same pattern established for Social Media. This page, and the field matrix and source mappings alongside it, describe how website analytics data is captured and mapped; the canonical, organization-level metrics themselves are published in Sales & Marketing metrics under sales.* identifiers.

Purpose

The Web Analytics domain represents visitor traffic, behaviour, and outcomes across the organization's public-facing websites, as measured by Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

It provides a common model for consolidating web analytics data from multiple properties into a consistent organizational view, using the same source-to-canonical mapping pattern already applied to Social Media and Observability.

Properties

The domain is initially scoped to six GA4 properties, one per website:

  • Adanian Labs
  • AICE
  • Afyarekod
  • DataInViz
  • Conversational Engine
  • Caspre

Each property is a distinct GA4 property with its own property ID, and property is a first-class dimension throughout this domain — data is never flattened into a single undifferentiated website total. The model is designed to accommodate additional properties as new sites or apps are brought under measurement.

Most of these properties are enterprise/B2B products rather than ecommerce storefronts, which matters directly for the Monetization area below: revenue and transaction metrics are defined for completeness, but are expected to show little or no data for most properties unless a revenue-generating "key event" (a demo request, a signup, a paid conversion) is explicitly instrumented for that site.

Scope

The domain covers information associated with:

  • Website sessions and users (new and returning)
  • Traffic acquisition (source, medium, campaign, channel group)
  • On-site engagement (engaged sessions, engagement rate, time engaged)
  • Page and screen views
  • Key events (GA4's current term for what earlier versions of Analytics called conversions)
  • Revenue and transactions, where applicable
  • Visitor retention and cohort behaviour
  • Real-time activity (current active users, their source, and the pages they are viewing)

Domain Model

The Web Analytics domain connects GA4's event-based measurement model to the organization's canonical ontology.

Website / App
      │
      ▼
GA4 Property
      │
      ├── records → Sessions & Users
      │
      ├── records → Events (including key events)
      │
      └── produces → Reports
                         │
                         ▼
                      Metrics
                         │
                         ▼
                       KPIs

GA4 itself organizes its standard reporting into four lifecycle stages — Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention — plus a Real-time view. This domain reuses that same four-stage grouping for its canonical metrics and KPIs, since it already reflects a coherent, source-native way of organizing the visitor journey rather than an organizational grouping imposed from outside.

For example:

GA4
    engagementRate
        ↓
sales.web_engagement_rate

GA4
    sessions
        ↓
sales.web_sessions

GA4
    conversions   (labelled "Key events" in the GA4 interface)
        ↓
sales.web_key_event_count

The source field name and the label shown in the GA4 interface are not always the same thing — see the Important Semantic Distinctions section of the field matrix — and neither is automatically the canonical organizational meaning.

Data Grain

Web analytics data exists at several grains, and — as with Social Media — the domain preserves the original grain rather than flattening everything into a single property-level daily total.

Common grains include:

Organization
Property (Website)
Session
User
Page / Screen
Event
Cohort
Time Period

For example:

sales.web_sessions
    Property × Time Period

sales.web_page_views
    Property × Page × Time Period

sales.web_retention_rate
    Property × Cohort × Time Period Since Acquisition

Real-time vs. Reporting Data

GA4 exposes two materially different kinds of read access, and this domain treats them differently:

  • Real-time reports show approximately the last 30 minutes of activity (current users, their first-user source, the audience segments they fall into, and the pages they are viewing). This is operationally useful but is not the basis for canonical metrics, since it cannot be queried historically once the 30-minute window has passed.
  • Standard (lifecycle) reports — Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, Retention — are the basis for the canonical metrics in this domain, queried through the GA4 Data API on a scheduled basis rather than read live.

Both draw on the same underlying dimensions (source, medium, page, audience), so the field matrix documents them together, but only the standard-report path feeds the canonical model.

Canonical and Source Data

The domain distinguishes between GA4's own representations and canonical organizational definitions.

GA4 Property
      │
      ▼
Source Representation
      │
      ▼
Canonical Mapping
      │
      ▼
Organizational Definition
      │
      ▼
Analytics / Dashboard / KPI

A GA4 field should not automatically become a canonical organizational definition — in particular, GA4's own "engagement rate," "conversions," and "retention" are not the same concepts as the pre-existing sales.engagement_rate (social media), sales.conversion_rate (CRM funnel), and sales.retention_rate (customer/partner) metrics already in the data dictionary. Where the underlying concept genuinely differs from an existing canonical metric, a distinct sales.web_* identifier is used rather than overloading the existing one. See the field matrix's Important Semantic Distinctions section for the full reasoning.

Relationship to the Data Dictionary

The Web Analytics domain uses definitions maintained in the organizational data dictionary.

The domain documentation describes how those definitions are applied within web analytics.

Data Dictionary
    sales.web_sessions
    sales.web_engagement_rate
    sales.web_key_event_count
            │
            ▼
Web Analytics Domain
    Adanian Labs
    AICE
    Afyarekod
    DataInViz
    Conversational Engine
    Caspre

This separation allows the same organizational concepts and metrics to be reused by other domains, and allows a seventh, eighth, or later property to be added without redefining any canonical metric.

Initial Domain Artifacts

The domain is documented through the following artifacts:

Artifact Purpose
Field Matrix Defines the fields exposed by GA4 and their canonical mappings.
Metrics Defines the canonical metrics used within the domain.
Source Mappings Documents the relationship between GA4 fields and canonical definitions.

These artifacts will evolve as the GA4 properties are fully instrumented and as organizational requirements — including whether Search Console keyword data should be added as a second source — are investigated.