Google Analytics

(Also referred to as Content (A/B) Testing.) Testing the relative effectiveness of multiple versions of the same advertisement, or other content, in referring visitors to a site. Multiple versions of content can be uniquely identified by using a utm_content variable in the URL tag.

Google Analytics has two basic levels of access - View Reports Onlyand Account Administrator. Users with View Reports Only access can view their Profiles' reports and view and edit their own language preferences. All Account Administrators have complete administrative control of the system.

The verification of a user's identity, often through the use of a unique username and password, to control access to Internet or intranet resources.

The average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session. The Content Optimization > Content Performance > Depth of Visit report shows page depth figures over a specified period of time

The amount of data that can be transmitted along a communications channel in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second (bps) or bytes per second, where 1 byte = 8 bits.

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

The'Clicks' metric is the number of clicks on your search ads. This metric can be found on the Clicks tab of reports in the Traffic Sources --> AdWords section.

(CTR) The number of times an ad is clicked on, divided by the number of impressions it receives. For example, if an ad is shown 20 times and receives 3 clicks, the clickthrough rate is 3/20, or 15%.

When tagging links, Content is used to label different versions of an advertisement. The variable for content, utm_content, indicates which version of a link the visitor clicked on to reach a web site - for example, utm_content=graphic_v2.Content is one of the five dimensions of campaign tracking; the other four are source, medium, campaign, and term

An advertising model in which advertising is either manually or automatically targeted to the content of a page. For example, on a site about motorcycles, the content-targeted advertisements would likely be related to motorcycles and motorcyclists

A conversion occurs when a visitor reaches a goal. There are three kinds of goals: URL Destination goals, Time on Site goals, and Pages per Visit goals.A URL Destination goal is a page that visitors see once they have completed an activity. For an account sign-up, this might be the “Thank You for signing up” page. For a purchase, this might be the receipt page. A URL Destination goal triggers a conversion when a visitor views the specified page.A Time on Site goal is a time threshold that you define. When a visitor spends more or less time on your site than the threshold you specify, a conversion is triggered.A Pages per Visit goal allows you to define a pages viewed threshold. When a visitor views more pages --or fewer pages --than the threshold you've set, a conversion is triggered.Goals may be defined in the Goal Settings section of each profile. Optionally, goals may be combined with a defined Funnel - a series of pages through which the user must navigate in order to reach a goal.

A small amount of text data given to a web browser by a web server. The data is stored on a user's hard drive and is returned to the specific web server each time the browser requests a page from that server.Cookies are used to remember information from page to page and visit to visit, and can contain information such as user preferences or shopping cart contents, and can note whether a user has logged in so that they do not need to authenticate again as they navigate through the site.

Cost data is information imported from an AdWords account (i.e. impressions, clicks, cost, CTR, CPC) into an Analytics account. This data is found on the 'Clicks' tab of reports in the Traffic Sources --> AdWords section.

The AdWords account from which a Google Analytics account imports its cost data.

An advertising model in which the advertiser pays a certain amount each time their ad is clicked, irrespective of how many times the ad is displayed. Also sometimes referred to as PPC (pay-per-click).

The Default page is the webpage to which your server defaults when no page on the domain is specified. For example, if the "index.html" page is loaded from your server when a user enters "www.yourdomain.com", "index.html" is considered to be the Default page.Your Analytics Profile Settings page contains a field in which to specify your default page. This information allows Google Analytics to combine hits to www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.html, which are in fact the same page. If Default page isn't specified, these would be reported as two separate pages.

A directory is a virtual container for holding computer files. It is not merely a list of items, as the name would imply, but rather a key building block of a computer's storage architecture that actually contains files or other directories.

(Reverse DNS Lookup) The process of converting a numeric IP address into a text name. For example, 192.0.34.166 is converted to www.example.com.

A domain is a specific virtual area within the Internet, defined by the "top level" of the address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The top level is the end of the address; example: "whitehouse.gov". In this example, the top-level part of the domain is ".gov", indicating a US government entity. The "whitehouse" part is the second-level domain, indicating where within the ".gov" domain the information in question is to be found. Other common top-level domains include ".com", ".net", ".uk", etc.

(DNS) An Internet addressing system that uses a group of names that are listed with dots (.) between them, working from the most specific to the most general group. In the United States , the top (most general) domains are network categories such as edu (education), com (commercial), and gov (government). In other countries, a two-letter abbreviation for the country is used, such as ca ( Canada ) and au ( Australia ).

To retrieve a file or files from a remote machine to your local machine.

The buying and selling of goods and services, and the transfer of funds, through digital communications. Buying and selling over the internet, etc.

The process of encoding information so that it is secure from other Internet users.

Exclude is a filter type that discards all pageviews that do not match the filter string. For example, you may wish to create an Exclude filter that matches your home computer's IP address, so that your own pageviews do not show up in Google Analytics reports.

A text string or regular expression that is applied to incoming traffic data. Filters are used to manipulate this data before it appears in Analytics reports, either by excluding certain pageviews or by rewriting data to make reports more readable or relevant.

When a pageview is logged, Google Analytics collects a range of information about that visit. This information can include the referrer, the IP address of the visitor, and the domain, subdirectories and filename of the page viewed. These different pieces of information are sorted into fields.To apply a filter to this information, you must identify the applicable field. This is the filter field.

The Filter Name is intended to be a descriptive title for a filter. It is used only as an organizational aid, and may contain spaces.

A Filter Pattern is the actual text string against which Google Analytics will attempt to match pageview data. Patterns can be specific text to match or may use wildcards as part of a regular expression.

There are a number of different Filter Types available in your Google Analytics account. There are three preconfigured filters for common tasks, as well as Advanced filter options that allow you to manipulate data to suit your needs.For full descriptions of filter types, please read the Filters section of the Analytics Help Center.

A security device that protects a network from unauthorized access. This can be a special kind of hardware router, a piece of software, or both.

A set of fields on a web page for data entry. The form is submitted by the user and the data is sent to the server for processing.

A "page within a page." A frame is a rectangular region within a web page, in which another page is loaded. Frames are often used for navigation menus, so that the navigation bar remains on the page while new pages are loaded within the frame.

(File Transfer Protocol) A common method for copying a file from one computer to another through the Internet.

The GET method is a way of passing parameters of an HTTP request from the browser to the server. This method puts the parameters, usually separated by special characters such as ampersands ("&"), in the URL itself, which is viewable to the person using the browser. The other method is POST, which is used when the site does not want to pass the parameters in the URL. POST is desirable when there is a large quantity of text to send to the server or the information is sensitive. Here is an example GET request:http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py? answer=33019&query=UTM&topic=0&type=f

A graphics file type. The Graphics Interchange Format is a compressed, bitmapped format often used on the web because of its good quality to compression ratio, especially with images containing large, flat areas of color.

A conversion occurs when a visitor reaches a goal. Goal Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits which resulted in a conversion to at least one of your goals.There are three kinds of goals: URL Destination goals, Time on Site goals, and Pages per Visit goals.A URL Destination goal is a page that visitors see once they have completed an activity. For an account sign-up, this might be the “Thank You for signing up” page. For a purchase, this might be the receipt page. A URL Destination goal triggers a conversion when a visitor views the specified page.A Time on Site goal is a time threshold that you define. When a visitor spends more or less time on your site than the threshold you specify, a conversion is triggered.A Pages per Visit goal allows you to define a pages viewed threshold. When a visitor views more pages --or fewer pages --than the threshold you've set, a conversion is triggered.Goals may be defined in the Goal Settings section of each profile.

A request to the web server for a file. This can be an HTML page, an image (jpeg, gif, png, etc.), a sound clip, a cgi script, and many 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 website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading.

Hyper Text Markup Language is used to write documents for the World Wide Web and to specify hypertext links between web pages and documents

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is a standard method of transferring data between a web server and a web browser.

A text reference in a web page that, when clicked, directs the user's browser to another page or document. Hyperlinks are integral to the World Wide Web, allowing every page to be linked to any other page.

A display of a referral link or advertisement on a web page.

A type of filter within your Google Analytics account. Include filters match a text string or regular expression against incoming data, and keep only those hits that match. Other hits are discarded and are not included in your Analytics reports.

A unique identifier for a computer or device on a TCP/IP network such as the Internet. An IP address is written as four numbers, each separated by periods. Each number ranges from 0 to 255.Example: 192.168.0.1

Internet Service Provider. A company which provides other companies or individuals with access to, or presence on, the Internet. Your DSL or cable internet service is provided to you by your ISP.

Java is a programming language which runs within a visitor's browser. TheJava Enabled report shows the percentage of your visitors who have Java enabled.

A scripting language commonly used within web pages. JavaScript programs are executed by the browser, rather than running on the server. Google Analytics uses JavaScript in its tracking code, and provides JavaScript functions such as urchinTracker to help users customize their reports.

A significant word or phrase, relevant to the web page or document in question.Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the internet. To see conversions per keyword, click the Goal Conversion tab in the Traffic Sources > Keywords report.Registering your site with Google Sitemaps will also provide information on the top searches that return your site, even if searchers aren't clicking through from those results.

The first page that a user views during a session. This is also known as the 'entrance page.'See the 'Top Landing Pages' report to see where your visitors are entering from and which landing pages are most effective.

In the context of campaign tracking, medium indicates the means by which a visitor to a site received the link to that site. Examples of mediums are "organic" and "cost-per-click" in the case of search engine links, and "email" and "print" in the case of newsletters. The UTM variable for medium is utm_medium.Medium is one of the five dimensions of campaign tracking; the other four dimensions are source, campaign, term, and content.

A special HTML tag that provides information about a web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.

Describes the movement of a user through a website or other application interface. This term also indicates the system of available links and buttons that the user can use to navigate through the website.

A set of computers connected so that they can communicate and share information. Most major networks are also connected to the global network called the Internet.

Google Analytics records a visitor as new when any page on your site has been accessed for the first time by a web browser. This is accomplished by setting a first-party cookie on that browser. Thus, new visitors are not identified by the personal information they provide on your site, but are rather uniquely identified by the web browser they used

The "(no referral)" entry appears in various Referrals reports in the cases when the visitor to the site got there by typing the URL directly into the browser window or using a bookmark/favorite. In other words, the visitor did not click on a link to get to the site, so there was no referral, technically speaking.

A general term referring to anything connected to or conveyed through the internet.

Any file or content delivered by a web server that would generally be considered a web document. This includes HTML pages (.html, .htm, .shtml), script-generated pages (.cgi, .asp, .cfm, etc.), and plain-text pages. It also includes sound files (.wav, .aiff, etc.), video files (.mov, etc.), and other non-document files.Image files (.jpeg, .gif, .png), javascript (.js) and style sheets (.css) are generally not considered to be pages.

A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed. This can be an HTML or similar page with tracking code being loaded by a browser, or a call to _trackPageview() to simulate a pageview.

A password is the word or code used to authenticate a user on the Google Analytics administration or reporting system, or any other protected system. It is advisable to use passwords that are difficult to guess, such as those containing numbers or symbols.

An advertising model in which the advertiser pays a certain amount to the publisher each time the advertiser's ad is clicked from the publisher's site. Also referred to as cost-per-click.

Portable Document Format. A file format developed by Adobe Systems to allow for display and printing of formatted documents across platforms and systems. PDF files can be read on any system equipped with theAcrobat Reader software.

Delete

A method of sending form data from a web page to a server. The POST method sends information in the body of the submission, as opposed to the GET (default) method, which sends the form information as parameters in the URL. POST allows for the sending of larger amounts of data, and does not show the encoded form in the URL.

A Profile is a set of rules that dictate the data to be used for your Google Analytics reports. Profile information includes but isn't limited to the domain or subdomain to be tracked, whether data should be collected for certain pages or directories only, user access levels, and funnel and goal configurations.While a single profile generally corresponds with a single domain, there are situations in which multiple profiles are used to track a single domain. This would occur when two sets of reports are required, each with different data filters and/or access rights, for example.

The profile ID of your account can be found in the URL of your reports. For example, if you select a profile from an account and view your reports, you may see a URL string that looks like this: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=123456&pdr=00000000-00000000The profile ID is the number that comes right after the &id parameter. So, in this case, your profile ID would be 123456.Learn more about the difference between account numbers and web property IDs.

Any VARIABLE=VALUE pair that follows the question mark ("?") in a URL. Google Analytics receives campaign information from query parameters appended to destination URLs.For example, the URL http://www.example.com/search?q=foocontains the query parameter q=foo.

A special character in a URL that separates the page location information from the query string. The query string may contain numerous field=valuepairs, all of which must come after the initial query token.For example, in this URL:http://www.google.com/search?q=analyticsthe query token is the question mark.

The VARIABLE portion of the VARIABLE=VALUE pair that makes up a query parameter. Variables store information for a web page to use, such as search terms entered into a search engine.For example, when a user searches Google for "foo", the resulting URL is:http://www.google.com/search?q=fooIn this example, the query variable is q.

In Google Analytics, a site that refers traffic to the site you are tracking.A referral occurs when any hyperlink is clicked that takes a user to a new page of file in any website - the originating site is the referrer.When a user arrives at your site, referral information is captured, which includes the referrer URL if available, any search terms that were used, time and date information and more.

The URL of an HTML page that refers visitors to a site.

The URL of an HTML page that sends visitors to a site by means of a hyperlink.

A string that uses wildcards and syntax rules to match a set of strings. Regular expressions are used in Google Analytics to customize filters to match the incoming data.For example, if a user wishes to apply a filter to all hits on image files, a regular expression could be used:\.(gif|jpg|png)For more information on regular expressions, including a list of wildcards, please read What are regular expressions?

A session for which the visitor can be tracked as unique, and who has visited the site previously during the current Date Range.

Universal Resource Indicator, or the path part of a URL. For example, in the URL http://example.com/olympics/sports/hockey, the hostname is 'example.com' and the request URI is the section after the hostname, '/olympics/sports/hockey.' During processing, the Google Analytics processing engine parses through each of the __utm.gif hits, and stores the hostname and the request URI into separate database fields.You can use this field to refine report data by a known request URI for a single page or a set of pages. Results are returned for all pages that match your indicated string. For example, you could enter /company/about/ to include or exclude all pages in the about directory of the company website.

(Revenue - Cost) / Cost, expressed as a percentage.For example, if an investment of $150 was made for advertising, and led to $500 in sales, the ROI would be:($500 - $150) / $150 = 2.33 or 233%

Google Analytics records a visitor as 'returning' when the _utma cookie for your domain exists on the browser accessing your site.

In versions of Google Analytics that support e-commerce reporting, the term Revenue is used in place of whichever local currency is being used, since Google Analytics supports currencies other than the US dollar. Revenue tabs appear on several reports as data-display options when appropriate.

Name resolution software that looks up an IP address to obtain a domain name. It performs the opposite function of the DNS server, which turns names into IP addresses.

Quality of an implementation that allows it to grow as the usage of the service increases.

A short computer program written in a simplified programming language, such as JavaScript, VBScript, or Perl.

A Search Engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents in which those keywords were found, often ranked according to relevance. Although a search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

A period of interaction between a visitor's browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time.For the purpose of Google Analytics reports, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for 30 minutes. You can update this setting with an addition to our tracking code.

In the context of campaign tracking, a source is the origin of a referral. Examples of sources are the Google search engine, the name of a newsletter, or the name of a referring website. The UTM variable for source is utm_source.Source is one of the five dimensions of campaign tracking; the other four dimensions are campaign, medium, term, and content.

A status code, also known as an error code, is a 3-digit code number assigned to every request (hit) received by the server. Most valid hits will have a status code of 200 ("ok"). "Page not found" errors will generate a 404 error. Some commonly seen codes are shown below inbold .100 Continue 101 Switching Protocols 200 OK 201 Created 202 Accepted 203 Non-Authoritative Information 204 No Content 205 Reset Content 206 Partial Content 300 Multiple Choices 301 Moved Permanently 302 Moved Temporarily 303 See Other 304 Not Modified 305 Use Proxy 400 Bad Request 401 Authorization Required 402 Payment Required 403 Forbidden 404 Not Found 405 Method Not Allowed 406 Not Acceptable 407 Proxy Authentication Required 408 Request Time-Out 409 Conflict 410 Gone 411 Length Required 412 Precondition Failed 413 Request Entity Too Large 414 Request-URL Too Large 415 Unsupported Media Type 500 Server Error 501 Not Implemented 502 Bad Gateway 503 Out of Resources 504 Gateway Time-Out 505 HTTP Version not supported

In the context of campaign tracking, term refers to the keyword(s) that a visitor types into a search engine. The UTM variable for term is utm_term. Term is one of the five campaign dimensions; the other four are source, medium, content, and campaign.

(TLD) The last part of a URL or domain name. For instance, the TLD of google.com is ".com", and the TLD of google.co.uk is ".uk".

The Google Analytics tracking code is a small snippet of code that is inserted into the body of an HTML page. When the HTML page is loaded, the tracking code contacts the Google Analytics server and logs a pageview for that page and captures information about the visit.The tracking code looks similar to the example below:<script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();</script>

A unique pageview, as seen in the Top Content report, aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

A unique view, as seen in the Top Content report, aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

A Unique Visitor Session is a visitor interaction with a website for which the visitor can be tracked and declared with a high degree of confidence as being unique for the time period being analyzed.

Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a means of identifying an exact location on the Internet. For example, http://www.google.com/analytics/conversionuniversity.html is the URL that defines the use of HTTP to access the web page conversionuniversity.html in the /analytics/ directory on the Google website. URLs typically have four parts: protocol type (HTTP), host domain name (www.google.com), directory path (/analytics/), and file name (conversionuniversity.html).

As it pertains to Google Analytics, a user is defined as a person who has been granted access to an account.

A user agent is a generic term for any program used for accessing a website. This includes browsers (such as Firefox), robots and spiders, and any other software program that retrieves information from a website.

See Session

A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website's perspective, 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.

A Visitor Session is a defined period of interaction between a Visitor (both unique and untrackable visitor types) and a website.

The W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, is a standards body dedicated to ensuring interoperability between all the varied system and network types that comprise the World Wide Web part of the Internet. The W3C log format is commonly used by several web server software systems, such as Microsoft IIS. For more information, see the W3C website .

Your web property ID, informally referred to as UA number, can be found by clicking the check status link or by searching for UA- in the source code of your web page. The web property ID has two parts: the X's (UA-XXXXX-YY) represent your account number and the Y's (UA-XXXXXX-YY) represent profile numbers within your account. The complete string (UA-XXXXX-YY) is referred to interchangably as your web property ID or UA number.