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Ad Click
A click on an advertisement on a website
which takes a user to another site.
ASP
Application Service Provider:
Use of web analytics application without
installing the application inhouse, also Active Server Pages.
Authentication
The technique by which access to Internet or
Intranet resources requires the user to enter
a username and password as identification.
Authenticated Visitor:
Visitors that have given unique identification i.e. by login
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Banner Ad
An advertisement embedded on a web page
usually intended to drive traffic to a different
website by linking to the advertiser's site.
Benchmark
A standard by which something can bemeasured or judged. For example, WebTrends Analytics 8 helps you benchmark your Key Performance Indicators to ensure everyone in your organization is measuring performance against the same goals.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of entrances on a web page
that result in an immediate exit from the web
site also known as 1-page visitors.
Campaign Analysis
A web analytics functionality that tracks activity originating from a marketingcampaign, so you can compare your campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness.
Conversion
An action that signifies a completion of a specified activity. For many sites, a user converts if they buy a product, sing up for a newsletter, or download a file. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who do convert. Cookie deletion can have an impact on your conversion rate because if a cookie is being systematically deleted, repeat visitor rates will be under-counted and new visitor rates will be over-counted, thus skewing the conversion rate metric by which you analyze your site's overall effectiveness.
Cookies
HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts. The term "cookie" is derived from "magic cookie," a well-known concept in Unix computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies.
Cookies have been of concern for Internet privacy, since they can be used for tracking browsing behavior. As a result, they have been subject to legislation in various countries such as the United States and in the European Union. Cookies have also been criticised because the identification of users they provide is not always accurate and because they could potentially be used for network attacks. Some alternatives to cookies exist, but each has its own drawbacks.
Cookies are also subject to a number of misconceptions, mostly based on the erroneous notion that they are computer programs. In fact, cookies are simple pieces of data unable to perform any operation by themselves. In particular, they are neither spyware nor viruses, despite the detection of cookies from certain sites by many anti-spyware products.
Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, but rejection makes some websites unusable. For example, shopping baskets implemented using cookies do not work if cookies are rejected.
CTR
A click through rate is the rate at which visitors "click through" from one website
page or property to the next. A good indication of an ad's effectiveness.
First Party Cookie
For most business models, first-party cookies are regarded as the most reliable method to measure visitor activity. Whereas a thirdparty cookie is usually set by an analytics vendor, (an entity with whom the user does not have a relationship), a first-party cookie is set by the business, an organization with whom the Web site visitor has specifically chosen to do business. Because of this relationship, first-party cookies are deemed more secure by the user.
Geo Location
Identifying the regional origin of a website
visitor (country, county, city).
IP
An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique address that certain electronic devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP) including routers, switches, computers, time-servers, printers, Internet fax machines, and some telephones—can have their own unique address.
In other words, the IP address acts as a locator for one IP device to find another and interact with it. It is not intended, however, to act as an identifier that always uniquely identifies a particular device.
An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number (compare: VoIP (voice over the internet protocol)) for a computer or other network device on the Internet. Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on a network. An IP address differs from other contact information, however, because the linkage of a user's IP address to his/her name is not publicly available information.
Further, an IP address is not necessarily linked, in a persistent way, to a physical location or even data link layer address.
In the past, an IP address could be considered a unique identifier of a particular IP host, in addition to being a locator. When it was usable as an identifier, it was static, and it was assumed to be globally unique from end to end of the Internet.
In current practice, an IP address is less likely to be an identifier, due to technologies such as:
- Dynamic assignment
as with an address that is assigned by the access device by which the user's host connects over a dialup telephone line or by a set-top box for an IP over cable network. However the network provider maintains a database of which IP address was assigned to which access port on dialup, or MAC address on LANs or broadband networks. This information, assuming it is available to the investigator, may help to identify the computer, although that is unlikely if it was a dialup connection where the identifier is of the dial-in port, not the computer itself. More extensive forensic work, with access to telephone records, may identify the calling telephone, although that may itself be a "cutout" on the way to the real telephone. - Network address translation (or NAT)
a feature common on gateway routers in corporate networks or home LANs, where the address visible to the Internet is the "outside" of a device that maps it to a completely different and hidden address on the "inside". See IP Address Translation, below.
KPI
Key Performance Indicator
are financial and non-financial metrics used to quantify objectives to reflect strategic performance of an organization. KPIs are used in Business Intelligence to assess the present state of the business and to prescribe a course of action. The act of monitoring KPIs in real-time is known as business activity monitoring. KPIs are frequently used to "value" difficult to measure activities such as the benefits of leadership development, engagement, service, and satisfaction. KPIs are typically tied to an organization's strategy (as exemplified through techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard).
The KPIs differ depending on the nature of the organization and the organization's strategy. They help an organization to measure progress towards their organizational goals, especially toward difficult to quantify knowledge-based processes.
Page View
A Page View is generally defined as a request to load a single page of a website. On the web, a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another page that points to the page in question.
Parameters
These are located in the URL immediately after a question mark and followed by an
equal sign and a return value, known as name=value.
Path
A path is the click pattern a visitor uses as
they traverse through multiple pages.
PI
Page Impression
Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.
Data collected almost always includes web traffic reports. It may also include e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.
Many different vendors provide web analytics software and services.
Referrals
The location that visitors come from, particularly the sites,
search engines or directories.
Robot
An automated process that performs Web Analytics Glossary V-EN09064
mundane, repeatable tasks to provide information. Search engine robots or bots
provide such functions, cataloging the internet for searchers to find information.
SEO
Search-Engine-Optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as "Black Hat" SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove their listings.
The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers", a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.
Spider
An automated software program that gathers
pages from the Internet.
SSL
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, e-mail, Internet faxing, instant messaging and other data transfers. There are slight differences between SSL and TLS, but the protocol remains substantially the same. The term "TLS" as used here applies to both protocols unless clarified by context.
Third-party cookie
Hosted web analytics services track visitor
behavior by inserting a small piece of
tracking code onto each page of a site.
Because the cookie is served by an analytics
vendor rather than your own site, the cookie
is considered third-party.
Traffic
On the web, traffic refers to the amount of data
sent and received by visitors to a website.
USP
The Unique Selling Proposition (also Unique Selling Point) is the marketing concept that was first proposed as a theory to explain a pattern among successful advertising campaigns of the early 1940s. It states that such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer and that this convinced them to switch brand.
Today, a number of businesses and corporations currently use USPs as a basis for their marketing campaigns.
Web Analytics
The measurement of data as it relates to an Internet site, including the behavior of visitors, the amount of traffic, the conversion rates, web server performance, user experience, and other information in order to understand and proof of results and continually improve the results of a site towards a set of objectives.