Do You Know Your Web Analytics Jargon?

In the sixth grade, I knew a girl who read dictionaries for fun. While other kids ran around during recess, kicking their hacky sacks—do they still have those?—and rubbing dirt into each other’s hair, this girl sat under a tree, her eyes skimming over individual definitions and sample sentences, reveling in whatever illumination she found there.

We snickered at her and continued playing what could loosely be interpreted as kickball—not sure we made as good a use of our time as her. Last I heard, she’s running a highly successful engineering consulting firm, which leads me to a general conclusion about my own field: sometimes in the wide world of web analytics it’s good to take a second and review the terminology. And especially if you’ve never taken the time to understand the jargon bantered about by the kids down in the IT basement, here’s a crash course on the relevant techno-slang.

Web Analytics: the collection and evaluation of all data regarding the use of your website, including how many hits each page received, who linked to your site, and so on. This information can be used to identify which portions of your site are receiving the most attention and which are leaking potential customers.

Abandonment: also called cart abandonment, whenever a visitor stops partway through the checkout process  for whatever reason, be it confusion or a usability issue.  Conversion optimization seeks to minimize this.

Bounce Rate: the percentage of visitors enter your site, look only at one page and then exit (the visitor enters and bounces right off your website)

Conversion: whenever a visitor performs a desired action, be it making a purchase, downloading a white paper,completing a Contact Us Form,  signing up for an email newsletter, or printing a coupon. The Conversion Funnel is the process each visitor goes through to perform this action—try to keep it short, sweet, and relatively painless. A high Conversion Rate is what you’re after.

Entry/Landing Page: The first webpage seen by a visitor upon entering your site, whether by a search engine query a web banner, a link from another website, or a PPC (pay-per-click) advertisment.

Recency: the number of times a unique visitor goes to your site within any particular time period (once a day, every two weeks, once a month)

Segment: usually of visitors, that web analytics seeks to identify in order to help you craft appropriate marketing and content changes to increase conversion rates

Session: the time a unique visitor spends on your site in one sitting

Unique Visitors: the number of inferred individual people who visited your website once (or more) within a designated time frame.

Hits:First a little background on “hits.” A “hit” occurs when a visitor accesses your website; their computer sends a request to your website’s server to begin downloading a page. Each element of a requested page (graphics, text, multimedia, etc.), is recorded by your site’s web server log as a “hit.” The first few years that websites were a reality, webmasters got really excited about the number of “hits” to their web pages and initially a large number hits were equated with a really popular website (lots of traffic). But a typical page will cause more than 20 hits on the server and that number can go up dramatically depending on page design and visit patterns, so webmasters and analysts soon figured out that tracking hits didn’t give them accurate picture traffic to a website. Instead, today we use metrics such as page views and visitors as guides for traffic measurement.

Did we miss one?  If you need help navigating through your web analytics reports, we can help you interpret the information and put it into action.