Getting Familiar with Metrics Language and Abbreviations

The world of social media, the social web, and metrics seems to come with its own language. Without turning the chapter into a glossary or full-fledged dictionary, I thought I’d quickly cover some terms you’ll continue to hear and see the most while navigating social media metrics:

Analytics: The catchall phrase for the data gathered from people viewing and interacting with your website or a piece of content that you have shared in social media, such as IP address, location, page views, conversions, and so on.

Bandwidth: Can refer to the amount of data being served by your web host (for example, a regular video download uses bandwidth, but a high-quality video download uses more bandwidth) or to the amount of attention your customer has to give your content and engagement.

Bounce rate: When a visitor to your website leaves after only viewing a single page, it’s a bounce. Your bounce rate is a number reflecting the percentage of all visitors who leave after only viewing a single page in a given time frame.

Business objectives: A list of goals and objectives set down in writing for a company to achieve, often going hand in hand with a written mission or brand statement.

Conversion: A procedure web visitors complete on your website that leads to new business, sales leads, product sold, items downloaded, or other voluntary acts beyond simply viewing the site.

Dayparting: Using analytics data to figure out what day(s) of the week and time of day your site (or ad) gets the most conversions and then optimizing accordingly (see Figure 8-3).

Goals: A statement of business intent. For example “I want to make more money” is a hope, not a goal. “I want to seat 15 percent more people this month using online ads” is a goal.

Key Performance Indicator(s) (KPI): Parameters intended to measure the business and marketing goals you set.

Macro conversion: The measurement of an outcome from a site visit (for example, a purchase).

Micro conversion: The measurement of the incremental steps that may lead to a macro conversion (for example, printing a product page, which may show intent to purchase in store; or printing directions, which can indicate the same thing).

Opt-in: Often called permission marketing, requires your potential customer to opt in to how they want their data used (or not used).

Pay-per-click (PPC): Internet advertising model in which advertisers only pay the ad host when the ad is clicked.

Search crawler: Sometimes called a spider, is the search engine’s automated program that surfs the web by leaping from one href link to another and tracking the links to provide search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Using keywords, content, and other tactics to improve how well a site appears in natural, organic search results.

Segmentation: Targeting your marketing efforts and analytics results by particular criteria, such as age, location, income, referring site, or browser.

Social Media Optimization (SMO): Sometimes known as social SEO, uses targeted social media engagement to bring new visitors and attention to a website and its content.