Web Analytics Glossary

Average Time On Site (AToS)

The average amount of time a user spends on a website.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

Cookie

A small amount of text data given to a web browser by a web server. The data is stored on a user's hard drive and is returned to the specific web server each time the browser requests a page from that server.

Cookies are used to remember information from page to page and visit to visit, and can contain information such as user preferences or shopping cart contents, and can note whether a user has logged in so that they do not need to authenticate again as they navigate through the site.

Default Page

The Default page is the webpage to which your server defaults when no page on the domain is specified. For example, if the "index.html" page is loaded from your server when a user enters "www.yourdomain.com", "index.html" is considered to be the Default page. Your Analytics Profile Settings page contains a field in which to specify your default page. This information allows Google Analytics to combine hits to www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.html, which are in fact the same page. If Default page isn't specified, these would be reported as two separate pages.

Goal Conversion Rate

In the context of Campaign Tracking, the percentage of sessions on a site that result in a conversion goal being reached on that site.

Keyword

A significant word or phrase, relevant to the web page or document in question. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the internet. To see conversions per keyword, click the Goal Conversion tab in the Traffic Sources > Keywords report.

Landing page

The first page that a user views during a session. This is also known as the 'entrance page.'

Log file

A file created by a web or proxy server which contains all of the access information regarding the activity on that server. Each line in a log file generated by web server software is a hit, or request for a file. Therefore, the number of lines in a log file will be equal to the number of hits in the file, not counting any field definitions line(s) that may be present.

Medium (Campaign Tracking)

In the context of campaign tracking, medium indicates the means by which a visitor to a site received the link to that site. Examples of mediums are "organic" and "cost-per-click" in the case of search engine links, and "email" and "print" in the case of newsletters. The UTM variable for medium is utm_medium.

Medium is one of the five dimensions of campaign tracking; the other four dimensions are source, campaign, term, and content.

New visitor

Google Analytics records a visitor as 'new' when any page on your site has been accessed for the first time by a web browser. This is accomplished by setting a first-party cookie on that browser. Thus, new visitors are not identified by the personal information they provide on your site, but are rather uniquely identified by the web browser they used.

Query Parameter

Any VARIABLE=VALUE pair that follows the question mark ("?") in a URL. Google Analytics receives campaign information from query parameters appended to destination URLs.

For example, the URL http://www.example.com/search?q=foo contains the query parameter q=foo.

Referrer

The URL of an HTML page that refers visitors to a site.

Referrals

A referral occurs when any hyperlink is clicked that takes a user to a new page of file in any website - the originating site is the referrer. When a user arrives at your site, referral information is captured, which includes the referrer URL if available, any search terms that were used, time and date information and more.

Request URI

A request URI identifies a page or a set of pages on your website by the path and/or query parameters. For instance, if www.example.com is developed in static HTML and it has a page on that site called "about.html" located in a sub-directory on the site, the request URI for that page might be "/company/information/about.html". On the other hand, if example.com is developed in php, the request URI for that page might look like /pages.php?topNav=Company&sideNav=about&page=about.php.

You can use this field to refine report data by a known request URI for a single page or a set of pages. Results are returned for all pages that match your indicated string. For example, you could enter /company/about/ to include or exclude all pages in the about directory of the company website.

Returning Visitor

Google Analytics records a visitor as 'returning' when the _utma cookie for your domain exists on the browser accessing your site.

Return on Investment (ROI)

(Revenue - Cost) / Cost, expressed as a percentage. For example, if an investment of $150 was made for advertising, and led to $500 in sales, the ROI would be:
($500 - $150) / $150 = 2.33 or 233%

Search Engine

A Search Engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents in which those keywords were found, often ranked according to relevance. Although a search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Tracking Code

The Google Analytics tracking code is a small snippet of code that is inserted into the body of an HTML page. When the HTML page is loaded, the tracking code contacts the Google Analytics server and logs a pageview for that page, as well as captures information about the visit and non-identifying information about the visitor.

URL

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a means of identifying an exact location on the Internet. For example, http://www.google.com/analytics/conversionuniversity.html is the URL that defines the use of HTTP to access the web page conversionuniversity.html in the /analytics/ directory on the Google website. URLs typically have four parts: protocol type (HTTP), host domain name (www.google.com), directory path (/analytics/), and file name (conversionuniversity.html).

Unique Visitors

Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.

Untrackable Session

A period of visitor interaction with a website for which the visitor cannot necessarily be distinguished as being unique.

View

The View Total is the sum of the items currently shown in a report. This total does not include items that are not shown. For example, if the report in question is showing 10 items out of 45, the View Total number represents the total for only the 10 items shown. Below the View Total listing is the Total, which represents the sum of all items in this report for the specified Date Range.

Visitor

A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website's perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.

Visit (see Session)

A period of interaction between a visitor's browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time. For the purpose of Google Analytics reports, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for 30 minutes. You can update this setting with an addition to our tracking code.

Taken from Google Analytics Glossary