Web Analytics Terminology

Abandonment - The number of customers who dropped during the process of conversion, this can be visualize with help of Google Analytics Funnel & Goal Setting (Will Discuss in next post).

Bounce Rate – It is the percentage by which user exits from the landing page of the website. That means user has visit a single page.

Browser- It is a user agent used to retrieve or access a website. Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape are the popular ones.


Conversion funnel – A tool to judge step by step movement of a visitor moving towards the goal page. It should be created first in order to visualize.

Cookie - A small file stored on the visitor’s computer while browsing a website is termed cookies. They are stored to track the visitor movement, for example to track returning visitors.

Crawler – An automated program used by search engines to crawl websites on the web and to retrieve the useful information.These information are then refined and used in various ways.

Direct Traffic: Visitor that comes to a website by typing the website address on the Internet browser, offline promotion, bookmarks, word of mouth are the common examples.

Entry Page – The first page on which visitor lands.

Exit Page – The last page from which visitor left the website.

Filters – Refinement of data to receive required result by the help of set of rules.

First Party Cookie – These cookies are placed by the websites to which a user is browsing.

Hit – Number of file instant downloaded after having a request from user browser is known as hit. Even the download of single image is counted in hits.

Impressions – Number of times the Ad is displayed on the Internet.

Key Performance Indicators – A key term that defines the status and success of marketing strategies.

Keywords – Words and phrases entered in a search engine by the user in order to derive relevant information from the Search Engine.

Latency - For a particular period average number of visit by a visitors in a particular time frame reporting session is coined as latency.

Log Files – Log files are main source that help in analyzing the activities on a website. They are often raw files created on the server.

Organic Search – The natural free result displayed by the Search Engine.

Page Duration – Amount of time user spent on a website.

Page Views – Number of times a page in viewed by a user is counted in the page view. A single user can create multiple page views in a particular session.

Path Analysis – Analysis of movement of visitor on the web page.

PPC – Paid search marketing scheme offered by Search Engine, results are shown on Search Engine by CPC or CPM basis.

Regular Expressions- In context of Analytics regular expressions are those characters that are used to derive required result through filtering or over-writing.

Referrer – Counted as a traffic origin, this may be from directory, forums, blogs or links on a website.

Return Visitor – A visitor who is returning again to a website will count as a return visitor, this is tracked by the cookies stored in the computer by the website.

Session – This is the record of the single visitor browsing through the website and their time spent.

Web Analytics – It is the software to examine measure and analyze the user activity on a website to understand and measure the effectiveness of a website. Data gathered by such tool helps to examine the status and reach of a website.