A Glossary of Terms
What's a dashboard? What does KPI stand for? What's the difference between Organic and PPC search results? This glossary provides a handy guide to commonly used web marketing terms.
A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z
AAbandonment: When a visitor exits or leaves a conversion process on a website and does not return later in the session. See also conversion funnel.
Acknowledgement Page: A page displayed after a visitor completes an action or transaction. For example, a thank-you or a receipt page. An Acknowledgement Pages is often important in Scenario Analysis, where it is an indicator of a completed scenario.
Acquisition: The process of attracting visitors to your site.
ACT: After-Click Tracking is the recording the activity path of a visitor to a site after they have clicked on an email link.
Actionable data: Information that allows you to make a decision or can be made use of in any way. See also forward-looking metrics.
Ad: A link that takes a visitor to a web site when clicked on, usually graphic or text. See also banner ad.
Ad Click: A click on an advertisement on a web site which takes a user to another site. See also ad view.
Ad Hoc Query: A non-standard inquiry posed as the need arises. See also query.
Ad View: A web page that presents an ad. There may be more than one ad on an ad view. Once visitors have viewed an ad, they can click on it.
Affiliate Marketing: A method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for providing customers. Compensation could be made based on a value for visits, subscriptions, leads, sales, and so on. See also PPC.
Aggregate Data: A summary of collected information which groups data together without record-level statistics.
Analytics: see web analytics
API: Application Programming Interface is a system that a computer or application supplies to users in order to allow requests for service to be made of it by other computer programs. For example, an API might describe how to draw icons or windows using a library that has been created for that purpose.
ASP: Active Server Pages are a set of software components that run on a web server and let developers build dynamic web pages.
Attrition: The erosion of your customer base over time. The opposite of customer retention.
Authentication: The technique by which access to Internet or intranet resources requires the user to enter a username and password as identification.
Average Lifetime Value: The average of the lifetime values of all the visitors during the reporting period, where each visitor's lifetime value is the total monetary value of a visitor's past orders since visitor tracking began.
B
Bandwidth: Measure, in kilobytes of data transferred, of the traffic on a site.
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. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has created a standard set of banner ad sizes (Medium Rectangle, Rectangle, Leaderboard, Wide Skyscraper) into a set of guidelines called the Universal Ad Package).
Bot: See robot.
Bounce: See bounce rate and email bounce
Bounce Rate: The percentage of entrances on a web page that result in an immediate exit from the web site.
Browser: A program used to locate and view HTML documents (Microsoft Internet Explorer for example.)
Business Intelligence: While some would claim it's an oxymoron, business intelligence refers to a category of software and tools designed to gather, store, analyze, and deliver data in a user-friendly format to help organizations make more informed business decisions. Software types include dashboarding, data mining, data warehouses, and other information systems.
C
Campaign Creative: A "Creative" describes the characteristics of a marketing activity, such as color, size and messaging-for example, a "Buy Now" graphic.
Client: The browser used by a website visitor.
Client Error: An error that occurs because of an invalid request by the visitor's browser. See also return code.
CNAME: A Canonical NAME record makes one domain name an alias of another.
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.
Conversion funnel: The series of steps that move a visitor towards a specified conversion. See also abandonment.
Convert: See conversion.
Conversion funnel: The series of steps that move a visitor towards a specified conversion event, such as an order or registration signup. See also abandonment.
Cookie: A text file that transmits information to a data collection facility via a 1x1 pixel GIF image request and includes a tracking ID that is used to identify returning visitors. Contrary to some industry speculation, cookies can not be used for malicious use such as privacy tapping. See also first and third-party cookies.
CPG: Consumer Packaged Goods
Crawler: See spider.
CTR: Click Through Rate. 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.
Customer Segment: A powerful aspect of relationship marketing in which you target sub-section or group of customers who share a specific trait or set of behaviors. See also demographics and psychographics.
D
Dashboard: A web analytics dashboard provides all of your critical metrics in one place to help you understand the health or performance of your business.
Data Warehouse: is a logical collection of information gathered from many different operational databases used to create business intelligence that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks, primarily, a record of an enterprise's past transactional and operational information, stored in a database designed to favor efficient data analysis and reporting.
Demographics: The physical characteristics of human populations and segments of populations, often used to identify consumer markets. Demographics can include information such as age, gender, marital status, education, and geographic location. See also psychographics.
DNS: A Domain Name System is an Internet addressing scheme that uses a group of names that are listed with dots (.) between them. See also domain.
Domain: An area in the Internet specified by a URL address. The top-level domain is at the end after the dot and the second-level domain comes before it, and shows where in the top-level domain the address can be found. For example in www.webtrends.com, ".com" is the top-level domain and "webtrends" is the second level domain.
Domain Name: The text name that corresponds to a numeric IP address of a computer on the Internet.
E
E-commerce: The act of selling goods and services online via a standalone site or through an online auction center.
Email bounce: The number of e-mails that were sent but never reach the intended receiver.
Entry page: The first viewed page on a visitor's path through a site.
Exit page: The last page viewed on a visitor's path through a site.
F
Filters: A means of narrowing the scope of a report or view by specifying ranges or types of data to include or exclude.
First party cookie: For most business models, first-party cookies are regarded as the most reliable method to measure visitor activity. Whereas a third-party 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. Also see cookies.
Form: An HTML page which passes variables back to the server. These pages are used to gather information from users. Also referred to as scripts.
Forward-looking metrics: Metrics that are indicators of future performance. For example an increase in traffic is a good indicator of down-stream conversion performance.
Frequency: The number of times a visitor has visited a site during a reporting period. Average Frequency is the average of frequencies of all the visitors during the reporting period. Frequency is a retention metric and is part of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis. See also recency and latency.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol is a standard method of sending files between computers over the Internet.
Funnel: See conversion funnel
G
GIF: A Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap format for images with up to 256 distinct colors. Commonly used on the web for animated banner ads.
GRP: Gross Rating Point is the percentage of the target audience reached by an ad.
H
Hit: Any request from a file or a web-server. A single page likely contains multiple hits as multiple image and text files are downloaded from the web-server.
Home Page: The main page of a web site. The home page provides visitors with an overview and links to the rest of the site
Home Page URL: The local path or Internet URL to the default page of the web site for which WebTrends reports will be generated.
HTML: HyperText Markup Language is a means of communicating text (and information about that text) that was designed to display pages with hypertext (links) and other information in a web browser.
HTTP: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is a standard method of transferring data between a web server and a web browser.
I
IAB: Interactive Advertising Bureau (http://www.iab.net/)
Impression: The display of an online advertisement (usually a banner ad) to a web site visitor.
Internet: The Internet is the publicly accessible global system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data via a standardized Internet Protocol. See also World Wide Web.
IP: Internet Protocol is a standard used for communicating data.
IP Address: Internet Protocol address is used to identify a computer connected to the Internet.
J
JavaScript tag: See page tag.
JPEG: A Joint Photographic Experts Group file format is a commonly used file type for photographic images, especially on the web.
K
Keyword: Terms entered into the search field of a web search engine. See also organic search and PPC.
KPI: Key Performance Indicators. Key Performance Indicators are typically kept in dashboards and provide customers with an understanding of how the site is performing.
L
Latency: The average number of days between visits for a given visitor during a reporting period. For example, those who visit on average every seven days. See also recency and frequency.
Link: On a web page, text or an image that has been coded to take a browser from one page to another or from one site to another.
Log File: A file created by a web or proxy server which contains all of the access information regarding the activity on that server. This kind of tracking is available from WebTrends solutions as well as page tagging.
LTV: Long Term Value or Life Time Value. Life Time Value is a metric used to describe the value a specific customer has over the life of their relationship with you.
M
Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM): Marketing Performance Management drives stronger customer relationships and higher lifetime value, based on a framework of established goals, consistent metrics, constant optimization across the entire marketing organization and across every customer touch point.
Marketing Warehouse: See data warehouse.
Metrics: Metrics are a system of parameters or ways of quantitative assessment of a process that is to be measured, along with the processes to carry out such measurement. Metrics define what is to be measured.
N
N-dimensional: Unlimited dimensions.
Navigation: The act of moving from location to location within a web site, or between web sites, accomplished by clicking on links. Navigation can also refer to the overall structure of the links on the site, comprising the paths available to the visitor.
Non-referrals: Visitors who arrive at a site by typing a domain into an address bar, using a bookmark, or clicking on an emailed URL. See also referrals.
O
OCR: Organic Click Rate. See also PPC.
On-demand service: WebTrends Marketing Lab is available as both an on-demand service and a software solution. WebTrends’ on-demand infrastructure provides redundant data collection, multiple co-located data centers and an advanced staging environment for quality control to ensure secure, always-available data.
Opt-in: This permission-based email communication requires customers to verify the opt-in method before their e-mail addresses can be used to communicate with them.
Organic Search: A type of search in which web users find sites having unpaid search engine listings, as opposed to using the pay per click advertisement listings displayed among the search results.
P
Page: A document provided by the server, including HTML, scripts, and text files. Images, sound files and video are not considered pages. Documents are defined by the system administrator, but generally include all static content, such as complete html pages. Dynamic pages are created with variables and do not exist anywhere in a static form. Forms are scripted pages which get information from a visitor that gets passed back to the server.
Page tag: A piece of JavaScript code embedded on a web page and executed by the browser when the page is viewed. See also log files.
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. See also hit.
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.
PEF: Personal Experience Factor is the customer's interaction with your website, advertising, or brand.
Performance Indicators: See KPIs.
PIE: Persistent Identification Element is a type of tag that is attached a user's browser, providing a unique ID similar to traditional cookie coding.
Platform: The operating system (such as Microsoft Windows) used by a visitor to the site.
POA: Point of Action is the location of a conversion event.
POC: Percentage of Completion
PPC: Pay Per Click or paid search uses search keywords that cost a certain amount for each customer click on that term in order to get to your site. See also organic search.
Protocol: An established method of exchanging data over the Internet.
Psychographics: Data used to build customer segments based on attitudes, values, beliefs and opinions as opposed to the factual characteristics. See also demographics.
Q
Query: A question or inquiry used to find answers about certain metrics.
Query Parameter: An individual piece of a query string consisting of a parameter name and a value for the parameter.
R
Rear-view mirror metrics: Metrics that measure what has occurred. For example campaign response metrics are such metrics that tell you how a campaign performed.
Recency: The number of days since a visitor's most recent visit during a reporting period. See also frequency.
Referrals: The location that visitors come from, particularly the sites, search engines or directories. See also non-referrals.
Relationship Marketing: Relationship marketing is a type of marketing that traces its roots to direct response marketing. It emphasizes building long-term relationships with customers rather than individual transactions. It requires understanding customer needs as they go through life cycles of interacting and purchasing from organizations, and requires that marketers accurately determine customer intent in order to provide them the right message at the right time.
Return Code: The return status of the request which specifies whether the transfer was successful and why.
| Possible "Success" codes are: 200 = Success: OK 201 = Success: Created 202 = Success: Accepted 203 = Success: Partial Information 204 = Success: No Response 300 = Success: Redirected 301 = Success: Moved 302 = Success: Found 303 = Success: New Method 304 = Success: Not Modified | Possible "Failed" codes are: 400 = Failed: Bad Request 401 = Failed: Unauthorized 402 = Failed: Payment Required 403 = Failed: Forbidden 404 = Failed: Not Found 500 = Failed: Internal Error 501 = Failed: Not Implemented 502 = Failed: Overloaded Temporarily 503 = Failed: Gateway Timeout |
RFM Analysis: Recency, Frequency, Monetary analysis.
ROMI: Return on Marketing Investment
ROAS: Return on Advertising Spending
Robot: An automated process that performs mundane, repeatable tasks to provide information. Search engine robots or bots provide such functions, cataloging the internet for searchers to find information.
ROI: Return on Investment
S
Scenario Analysis: A report showing the amount of activity at each step of a defined scenario, plus conversion rates for each transition from step to step as well as for the whole process. Examples of scenarios are check-out, registration, or application sequences.
Script: See JavaScript.
Search Engine: A search engine is a program that helps you find information on the web.
Segment: A grouping of customers, defined by website activity or other data, which can be used to target them effectively.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Server: A computer that hosts information available to anyone accessing the Internet.
Server Error: A fault occurring at the computer hosting information. See also return code.
Session: A session is a record of one visitor browsing through a site.
Sessionization: This is the process for creating a session. Sessionization methods are ways in which you can define a session. Web Analytics solutions have multiple sessionization methods such as cookies, IP Address, IP+ Agent and so on. These methods tell the web analytics system how they should count a series of page requests from the same individual or browsing machine.
SKU: Stock Keeping Units
SmartSource: A trademarked technology from WebTrends. SmartSouce Data Management offers an alternative to traditional web server log file analysis, collecting information directly from the visitor's browser (the client) rather than from server log files, improving data accuracy.
SmartView: WebTrends SmartView is an easy-to-use visual overlay of web metrics displayed right on a web page, which you can use to analyze page performance, providing insight into page conversion, path analysis, and overall web page statistics such as unique visitor counts.
Spider: An automated software program that gathers pages from the World Wide Web.
Suffix: The last part of a domain that can be used to identify the type of organization or location of a site.
T
Tag: See page tag.
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.
U
User: The end-user of a product or device. For example an end user of the WebTrends Marketing lab can be defined as a "user". User typically refers to the end user of WebTrends products.
UNIX: is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy.
URL: A Uniform Resource Locator is a means of identifying an exact location on the Internet.
User Agent: Fields in an extended web server log file identifying the browser and platform used by a visitor.
User Session: A period of activity (all hits) for one user of a web site. A unique user is determined by the IP address or cookie. By default a user session is terminated when a user is inactive for more than 30 minutes. See also visit.
UV: Unique Visitors refers to a measure captured by some web analytics solutions that track the interaction a single user has with a website over time.
V
Visitor: Similar to unique visitor, visitor refers to an individual that visits a website. A visitor or unique visitor can have multiple visits.
Visit: A visit is an interaction an individual or unique visitor has with a website over a specified period of time or activity. In most cases, if a visitor has left a site or has not executed a click within 30 minutes, the visit session will terminate.
VOD: Video on Demand
W
W3C: World Wide Web Consortium develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.
Warehouse: See data warehouse.
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.
Website: A website is a collection of web pages, on particular domain name or sub-domain on the World Wide Web on the Internet. Usually it is made up of a set of web pages created using HTML and accessible via HTTP.
What if: A type of analysis that allows an end-user to pose hypothetical situations against their data to model or predict outcomes.
WIN Partner: The WebTrends Insight Network is a select group of leading interactive agencies, marketing consultants and web analytics experts worldwide that work with customers to maximize the success of their online initiatives through the use of WebTrends solutions.
WML: Website META Language, a free, extensible off-line HTML generation toolkit for UNIX, distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL v2).
World Wide Web: Also called the web, this is a global information space which people can communicate via computers connected to the Internet. Some people use "internet" and "the web" interchangeably, even though the web is a service that operates over the internet.
X
XML: Extensible Markup Language is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data.
Y
YoY: Year over Year
YSM: Yahoo! Search Marketing
Z
Zero Latency: Latency is a time delay between the moment something is started, and the moment one of the effects of that thing begins. When there is no time lapse between the thing and the effect, it's called zero latency. In analytics, this term is used to describe instantaneous receipt of data and the ability to analyze and act on that data.
Zero-page Visit: A visit that included no page views. This is possible if a visit consisted of at least one request for a non-page file (such as a graphic) but no page files (such as .htm, .asp, .jsp, or .cfm.)
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