Universal Analytics Calculated Metrics Calculations

Google Analytics provides a wide range of metrics to understand website performance. Among these, calculated metrics combine core metrics to create new, derived measures. A common example is bounce rate, calculated by dividing bounces by sessions.

When backing up your Universal Analytics data, it is important to pull the core metrics, and not the derived / calculated metrics.  The reason is that extracted tables tend to have many dimensions in them.  As such, the calculated metrics, like bounceRate, are at a very detailed level.  If you wanted to roll-up the analysis from say Day level to Month level, you cannot summarize or average out a calculated metric - instead you need to run the calculation again. 

To run the calculation at the right level of detail, you need the metrics required to create the calculation.  We've put together this comprehensive list using the Universal Analytics Meta Data API.