September 27, 2023
This comprehensive glossary is a valuable resource for product teams and budding entrepreneurs alike, providing a clear and concise explanation of 30 essential analytics terms crucial for making informed business decisions.

Key Analytics Concepts for Businesses
Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.
- bounce: A single-interaction session, typically one pageview;
Occurs when a user reaches your site and leaves without viewing another page or triggering any events;
Some tools include time limits for a bounce (for example, visiting the page for more than 10 seconds does not qualify as a bounce)
- bounce rate: Percentage of sessions that qualified as a bounce
- channel: Top-level groupings of how people reached your property, used to assess performance and inbound marketing;
For example: Organic Search, Social, and Email
- cohort: A set of users sharing a specified characteristic
- conversion: Reported when a user completes a goal or makes a purchase during a session
- dimension: Attribute or characteristic of users and their interactions with the site; Typically reports a word, such as the Previous page path, Device type, or Page title
- direct traffic: Includes users who reached your site either by typing the URL in their browser or if the referral method could not be tracked
- entrance (or entry): The first page viewed in a session
- event: An action that occurs within a page or view;
For websites, events can be anything that does not trigger a page load (HTTP request), such as playing a video or clicking an external link
- exit: The last page viewed in a session, when the user leaves the site
- exit rate: Percentage of exits from a specific page or set of pages
- filter: Functionality to exclude data from a report to view only a subset of data;
Filters can also be applied to an entire property to exclude data from being collected and reported, such as to exclude your personal sessions or particular IP addresses
- funnel: Visualization of each step in a path to completing a goal;
Used to assess where users drop off and do not continue on to the next step
- goal: A desired action or interaction, e.g., subscribing to an email newsletter, starting a live chat, or completing a contact form
- hit: Single interactions that send data to the analytics tool to process in reports; For example: a view of a page, or a triggered event
- metric: Data reported about a user, page, or other dimension;
Typically a number, like a count or percentage, such as Pageviews, Bounce rate, or Exits
- new user (or new visitor): Someone who visited your site for the first time during a specified time range, tracked by a lack of browser cookies;
People using a new device or different browser, or those who cleared their browser cookies, can be reported as a new visitor
- organic traffic: Includes people who reached your site by clicking a free (non-paid ad) link from a search engine results page (SERP)
- pages per session: Average number of pages viewed in each session
- pageview (or view): Reported when a page or view is viewed by a user during a session
- previous page path: A dimension showing the page viewed immediately before another page in a session; Useful for understanding how people are navigating between pages
- property: Typically a website, group of websites, or mobile app, for which data is collected using a unique tracking ID from the analytics tool
- referral traffic: Includes people who reached your site from another website; Useful to understand which websites are sending you traffic
- returning user (or returning visitor): People who had their second or later visit to your site during a specified time range, tracked by the existence of a browser cookie
- sampling: Practice of reporting only a portion of data rather than all users and sessions, in order to speed up processing;
This Often occurs when there are more than 500,000 sessions in the selected date range;
Can be avoided by reducing the selected date range
- search query: The term someone used to search on a search engine before clicking to reach your site either from a paid ad or organic search result;
Search query is not provided when people come from a secure (https) version of a search engine
- search term: The term someone used to search on your internal site search
- segment: A subset of your analytics data;
Typically a group of sessions or users that share some attribute
- session (or visit): The period during which a user is interacting with the site, consisting of 1 or more pageviews, events, and conversions;
Typically sessions will timeout due to inactivity after 30 minutes, after which a new session will be reported if another interaction occurs
- source: A dimension showing how people reached your site;
For example google.com or multiverseapp.com
Authored by
Grishma Rajput · Product Designer
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