Web Analytics Glossary of Terms
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Affilliate Marketing: Affiliate Marketing is a widespread method of promoting a website, in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder's-fees to individuals who introduce new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay-per-click), registrant (Pay-per-lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay-per-Sale).
Analytics: Analytics is the process of analysing data in order to extract useful information on which to base business decisions.
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Bounce rate: This shows a percentage of entrances on any given page that resulted in an exit from the page without entering any other page on the site.
Browser: To view your website a visitor must enter your website address into their browser. This is the computer program that is used to display your website content. Example browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari.
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Channel: A marketing campaign may be split up into a number of channels, each of these shows the ways in which your marketing message is being sent to consumers. Example channels are email, banner ads and PPC.
Clickstream: A clickstream is a record of which pages a visitor saw and in which order on a web site.
Clickthrough: A clickthrough means that the visitor selected a link from the ad to your website.
Content Management System (CMS): The more content a website has, the more it will become necessary to structure content into categories. Categories may have sub-categories. Such hierarchies can be many levels deep. A system that describes various categories, levels, and the dynamic or static content in each category is called a Content Management System (CMS).
Conversion: Where a visitor to your website follows through with a specified process. For example on an e-commerce website a visitor may look at a product, however when they complete purchase of the product then they have been converted. Conversion rate is the a measure of how many visitors have been converted and is often shown using a funnel.
Cookie: A cookie is used to track visitors to your website and is stored on the visitors computer. It contains a unique code that can be read by your website and associated with other information stored about your visiotr within your database.
Crawlers: Search engines employ crawlers (also known as Robots or Spiders) that periodically visit selected pages of websites in order to capture their content, to include within the indexes of the search engine.
Cross-selling: Cross-selling refers to selling additional products to existing csutomers.
Crosstab: A crosstab report shows how one metric influences another metric. An example crosstab report might be the number of visitors against page breakdown.
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Dashboard: A dashboard is an overview of multiple processes. For example in NetInsight you might have a Marketing dashboard which would show summaries of a number of marketing reports allowing the marketing manager have an overview of the marketing within the organisation.
Data capture: When visitors read your website they leave behind a trail of information about their computers and what pages they have seen. This data needs to be collected by using page tags, log files or cookies which are all methods of data capture.
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E-mail Campaign: A marketing activity that involves sending out large numbers of e-mails to customers or potential customers in order to meet a business objective.
Entry Page: The entry page is the page in which a visitor to your website enters on.
Exit Page: The exit page is the page in which a visitor to your website exits from.
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Funnel: A funnel report shows a predefined route through your website and the amount of visitors that are following that route and converting or dropping off at each stage. This type of report is useful for tracking business processes such as purchasing for an e-commerce website.
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Hits: Believe it or not, hits are not the best way to measure your site's success. A single visit by a user on your site's homepage may register as one hit or several hits based on how many elements are being called by that page (images, style sheets, etc.). Sessions may be a more accurate estimate of the number of visitors your site receives in any given time period.
Hyperlink: Hyperlinks are links located on the webpages themselves which link users to other pages containing further information.
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Impression: An impression is defined as an instance where a potential visitor views your ad.
Internet Marketing: Marketing activities such as banner ads, pay-per-click adverts or e-mail campaigns that involve using online mediums.
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Keyword: When you use a search engine like Google, MSN or Yahoo you enter a number of words for the search engine to use to find content. Those words are called keywords. NetInsight can track keywords people have used on these search engines to reach your website. This allows you to tailor your website (see SEO) or your internet marketing campaigns.
KPI: Key performance indicators also known as KSI (Key success indicators) are metrics that can be used to quantify objectives and measure strategic performance of an organisation.
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Local Search: Most websites offer a local search option where visitors can use the search function built into the website they are on and enter keywords in order to locate content pages that relate to what they are looking for on the website.
Log file: A log file is produced by your web server. Every time someone visits your website they leave a digital footprint of who they are, what page they viewed and at what time. This footprint is stored in the log file which can then be analysed using a web analytics tool such as Affinium NetInsight.
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Market-basket analysis: Market-basket analysis (also known as product affinity analysis) measures customers' likelihood to be interested in one product if they also showed interest in (or have purchased) another.
Metrics: Metrics are used as measurements. To effectively use metrics you must have a starting value, a target value and often historical data to represent a trend in the metric value over time.
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Online Marketing Campaign: An online marketing campaign can be defined as any marketing communication containing a website URL that visitors may visit in order to respond to the campaign.
Organic Rank: Organic rank refers to your website's first apperance amoung search results for a specific keyword on a specific search engine.
Organic Search: There are two types of traffic that reach your website, one is paid where you pay for advertisers to drive traffic to your site. The other type is organic where visitors have used search engines to reach your website. So organic means not paying for results but still achieving them.
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Page: A 'page' is any document provided by the server, including HTML pages, script pages (.asp, .cgi, etc.), and plain-text documents. Image, sound and video files are not considered pages.
Pagetag: This is a method of tracking visitors on your website complemented with the use of cookies. It allows you to track extra information about your visitors such as screen resolution, forms they have filled or half filled in and Javascript version amoung other items. It involves adding a portion of Javascript code to the HEAD tag in the source of your website on each page which can be achieved either manually or automatically.
Pageview: A 'pageview' is registered in your web analytics each time an actual document is served.
Path Report: Shows all of the paths that visiotrs to your website have taken. This shows the entry points, exit points and all the pages in between.
PPC: Pay-Per-Click is a type of online marketing activity that involves displaying an advert and being charged an amount of money for every person who clicks on that advert and is taken to your website as a result. It is a very popular method of internet marketing as it can get your website to the top of search engine results for specific keywords. This creates what is called paid traffic.
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Quadrant Analysis: Link placement analysis is sometimes also called quadrant analysis, even if the area of a webpage is not easily divided into exactly four quadrants.
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Recency: The term recency refers to the amount of time that has passed since a visitor's last visit or last purchase.
Referral: This will show where your visitors came from, particularly what search engines or directories. Non-referrals will be those visitors who typed your domain directly into the address bar or used an emailed link or bookmark to get there. Referrals are a great way to find out who is linking to you and what source is providing the most traffic for you. The nice thing about your Web Analytics is that whenever a search engine is a referral, the keyword used in the search is recorded for you to view.
RIA: Rich Internet Application are web based applications that are commonly referred to as Web 2.0. These applications usually rely on the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) programming technique.
ROI: Return On Investment - simply the net gain of an operation after you subtract the cost of running the operation.
RSS: A term used to define a way of providing content through the use of XML. The content typically includes a title, a link to a webpage and a small description of the page content.
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Scenario Report: A scenario report shows how much of your website traffic conforms to a particular predefined scenario. For example a scenario could define visitors who view 3 pages in succession, stay on the site for more than 10 minutes and complete a request for more information.
SCL: Scientific Computers Ltd is the parent company of SCL Analytics and can be found at www.scl.com
Segment: A marketing campaign channel may be made of many segments. If we take the exmaple of a PPC campaign a segment would be a group of keyword that all send traffic to a specific landing page. You may have many keyword groups and they would all be represented as segments.
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising your website so that search engines rank it highly for certain keywords. The result is an increase in the amount of visitors you receive from the search engines. This is a method of increasing your organic traffic.
Session: A session is a record of one visitor browsing through your site. Short sessions may indicate that your traffic is not very targeted because visitors are leaving your site after a short period of time.
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Traffic: Website traffic is the amount of visitors that you are getting on your website.
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Unica: Unica are the manufaturers of NetTracker and Affinium NetInsight. Visit them at www.unica.com
Up-selling: Up-selling refers specifically to selling higher-end products to existing customers.
User Agent: When a visitor to your website views any page of your site they leave a digital footprint. This footprint contains a user agent which defines which browser they have used to view your site. Example user agents may be Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari.
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Visitor: This is defined as more than one hit from the same IP address as long as there is no idle time of more than 30 minutes between those hits. Whenever NetTracker or NetInsight detects a gap of more than 30 minutes between any two hits from the same IP address, it is assumed that it is a new visitor.
Visitor Retention: A measurement of how many visitors are repeat visitors comapred to those who never come back.
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Web Analytics Consultant: A Web Analytics Consultant is someone who can guide you in how to achieve results with your web analytics investment given best practice.
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XML: Extensible Markup Language is a W3C initiative that allows information to be transferred in a strcutured way from one place to another. An RSS feed is an example of how XML can be used to describe content and its meta data.
