Custom dimension vs custom metric

Question

Ok, I'm trying to track when the users get an empty list of products.

The list is defined by a filter, I want to first know if there's a lot of people getting empty results to take some action like tracking what's the filter combination they're using, anyhow...

To picture it, this is what I want to achieve:

But I'm confused between the custom dimension and custom metrics. In my head, all I need is a custom metric (Cause the amount of empty results sounds like a metric to me).

So I created an "Empty list results" custom metric with the scope of Hit. And I'm passing just an integer 1 to this custom metric.

But it doesn't show what I need. Am I missing something?

UPDATE

Including every hit to the page, even when I'm not sending the custom metric index/value pair

In this example:

/custom-metric-test-1 does not include the custom metric index/value

/custom-metric-test-2 does include the custom metric index/value

But they both show in the report. It's like my custom metric it's just an alias for hits.

Answer 1

You can use a metric or a dimension, it depends on the result you want to get (read), in all cases you can have the number of times a page has a certain characteristic (in your case the empty product list).

Use a custom report, i.e. with flat table, put 'page' as a dimension and your custom metric as a metric. Page and hit are the same scope so the queried pair of elements shouldn't give you strange results.