Web Analytics Glossary

Abandonment – The number of customers who drop off during the process of conversion, like a half filled form or incomplete purchase.

Acquisition – Process of attracting visitors to a website or the number of visitors arrived.

Affiliate Marketing – A method of marketing where other websites can sign up to sell your products for a commission.

Bounce Rate – The instances of visitors entering and leaving the same page.

Click Through Rate – Usually used as banner ad success. It is number of clicks/ number of impressions.

Click Through – This is an instance of a click on a link leading to another section of the site or page, or another website.

Conversion – An activity which fulfills the intended purpose of a website like buying a product, filling up a form or subscribing to a newsletter. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who successfully convert.

Conversion funnel – The defined path, like a series of steps or pages for a visitor to reach the final objective, like filling up a form or purchasing a product.

Cookie – A text file placed on the visitor’s computer while browsing a website. Cookies contain information to track returning visitors.

Crawler – An automated program used primarily by search engines and other services to gather information from the World Wide Web.

Entry Page – The first page viewed by a visitor while browsing through a website.

Exit Page – The last page viewed, rather the page from which the visitor exited.

Filters – A set of rules to extricate information from a large amount of data.

First Party Cookie – These cookies are placed by the websites unlike third party cookies placed by vendors. First party cookies are understood to be secure and reliable.

Hit – An often confused term, hits are any request by the browser to the web server. A web page is a collection of different components like HTML, Images and CSS, each registering as a separate hit with every single request for the page.

Impressions – Each view of an online advertisement is counted as an impression.

Key Performance Indicators – The crucial parameters showing the health of the website and success of marketing strategies.

Keywords – Words and phrases entered in a search engine to reach a result page. Keywords help position websites well to attract potential customers.

Log Files – A text file created in the server capturing all activity on the website. This file is the primary source of data for analysis.

Organic Search – Users find results through unpaid search engines, unlike PPC.

Page Duration – Time spent by visitor on a web page.

Page Tags – Tags are JavaScript codes embedded in the web page to be executed by the browser. Tags are used to generate log files used by certain Web Analytics Tools.

Page Views – Each rendering of the web page by the server is counted as a page view.

Path Analysis – Analysis on how visitors traverse through the website. Gives valuable information to check if they follow the intended site navigation etc.

PPC – Pay per click, also called paid searches where the advertiser pays based on the number of clicks on the advertisement. Google and Overture are two popular paid search engines.

Referrer – Websites, Search Engines or Directories or any others identifiable as the origin of the visitor.

Return Visitor – A visitor who can be identified with multiple visits, either through cookies or authentication.

Search Analytics – Analyzing search terms and behavior of visitors using the website search engine.

Session – The record of a single visitor browsing through the website. It includes an entry page, navigation and exit pages.

Stickiness – A website’s capability to retain visitors, measured as number of pages visited per session and time spent on website.

Visitor – Also called unique visitor, is understood as an individual visiting the website over a specified period of time. A visit is understood as two consecutive actions by a visitor within a span of 30 minutes.

Visitor Segmentation – The process of segregating and studying visitors based on various behavior patterns.

Web Analytics – The process of collection, measurement and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website.