Understanding Key Analytics Terminology

One of the reasons that people find analytics programs so overwhelming is their obscure terminology and jargon. Here, we've taken the time to define some of the more popular terms (we even spent the time putting them in alphabetical order for you; you can thank us later):

• Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person leaves your site from the entrance page. This metric measures visit quality — a high bounce rate generally indicates that visitors don't find your site entrance pages relevant to them.

  In the eyes of e-commerce, bounce rate speaks to the quality of your entrance page. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors stay on your site and convert into purchasers, subscribers, or whatever action you want them to complete. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each ad that you run (in the case of businesses) or to the audience based on the referring (for example, if you create a special bio page for your Twitter profile). Landing pages should provide the information and services that the ad promises.

  When it comes to blogging, a high bounce rate from a social-media source (like a social news site like Digg) can tell you that users didn't find the content interesting, and a high bounce rate from search engines can mean that your site isn't what users thought they were getting. In blogging, having a low bounce rate really speaks to the quality of the content on your site. If you get a lot of search and social-media traffic, a bounce rate below 50 percent is a number you want to strive for.

• Content: The different pages within the site (the Content menu of Google Analytics breaks these pages down where they have their own statistics).
• Dashboard: The interface with the overall summary of your analytics data. It's the first page you see when you log in to Google Analytics.
• Direct traffic: When Web visitors reach your site by typing your Web address directly into their browsers' address bars. (Launching a site by a bookmark also falls into this category.) You can get direct-traffic visitors because of an offline promotion, repeat readers, word of mouth, or simply from your business card.
• First-time unique visitor: This metric tracks the number of visitors to your Web site who haven't visited prior to the time frame you're analyzing.
• Hit: Any request to the Web server for any type of file, not just a post in your blog, including a page, an image (JPEG, GIF, PNG, and so on), a sound clip, or any of several other file types. An HTML page can account for several hits: the page itself, each image on the page, and any embedded sound or video clips. Therefore, the number of hits a Web site receives doesn't give you a valid popularity gauge, but rather indicates server use and how many files have been loaded.
• Keyword: A database index entry that identifies a specific record or document. (That definition sounds way more fancy than a keyword actually is.) Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the Web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval by using keywords. Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for his or her document (which you can do by using meta tags), the search engine has to determine them. (So you can't guarantee how Google indexes the page.) Essentially, search engines pull out and index words that it determines are significant. A search engine is more likely to deem words important if those words appear toward the beginning of a document and are repeated several times throughout the document.
• Meta tag: A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags don't affect how the page appears in a user's browser. Instead, meta tags provide information such as who created the page, how often it's updated, a title for the page, a description of the page's content, and what keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when they build their indexes, although most major search engines rarely index the keywords meta tag anymore because it has been abused by people trying to game search results.
• Pageview: A page is defined as any file or content delivered by a Web server that would generally be considered a Web document, which includes HTML pages (.html, .htm, .shtml), posts or pages within a WordPress installation, script-generated pages (.cgi, .asp, .cfm), and plain-text pages. It also includes sound files (.wav, .aiff, and so on), video files (.mov, .mpeg, and so on), and other nondocument files. Only image files (.jpeg, .gif, .png), JavaScript (.js), and Cascading Style Sheets (.css) are excluded from this definition. Each time a file defined as a page is served, or viewed in a visitors Web browser, a pageview is registered by Google Analytics. The pageview statistic is more important and accurate than a hit statistic because it doesn't include images or other items that may register hits to your site.
• Path: A series of clicks that result in distinct pageviews. A path can't contain non-pages, such as image files.
• Referrals: A referral occurs when a user clicks any hyperlink that takes him or her to a page or file in another Web site; it could be text, an image, or any other type of link. When a user arrives at your site from another site, the server records the referral information in the hit log for every file requested by that user. If the user found the link by using a search engine, the server records the search engine's name and any keywords used, as well. Referrals give you an indication of what social-media site, as well as links from other Web sites and blogs, are directing traffic to your blog.
• Referrer: The URL of an HTML page that refers visitors to a site.
• Traffic sources: This metric tells you how visitors found your Web site — either via direct traffic, referring sites, or search engines.
• Unique visitors: The number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your Web site over the course of a specified time period. The server determines a unique visitor by using cookies, small tracking files stored in your visitors' browsers that keep track of the number of times they visit your site.
• Visitor: A stat designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visit a Web site. The Web site, of course, can't really determine whether any one “visitor” is really two people sharing a computer, 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.