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
