The web analytics glossary.

What do web analytics terms actually mean?

Web analytics terms describe three different things: units of traffic such as pageviews, sessions and visitors, rates calculated from them such as bounce rate and conversion rate, and methods applied to them such as funnels and cohort analysis. Most confusion comes from tools defining the same word differently.

Start with a category.

Analytics foundations

• Digital analytics

  Digital analytics is the measurement and analysis of customer behaviour across every digital channel a business operates: website, mobile app, email, advertising platforms, support and in-product usage.

• Event

  An event is any recorded action beyond loading a page: a button click, a form submitted, a video played, a subscription upgraded.

• Product analytics

  Product analytics is the measurement of what people do inside a product rather than how they arrived at it.

• Session

  A session is one continuous visit to a site: a group of pageviews and events from the same visitor with no long gap between them.

• Web analytics

  Web analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of what happens on a website: who visits, where they came from, which pages they see, and what they do before they leave.

Metrics and measurement

• Bounce rate

  Bounce rate is the share of sessions that end without a second interaction: one page loads, nothing else is recorded, and the visitor leaves.

• Churn rate

  Churn rate is the share of customers, users or revenue lost during a period.

• Conversion rate

  Conversion rate is the share of visits or visitors that completed a defined goal, such as a signup, a purchase or a demo request.

• DAU/MAU ratio

  DAU/MAU is daily active users divided by monthly active users, expressed as a percentage.

• Engagement rate

  Engagement rate is the share of sessions that met a defined engagement threshold rather than leaving immediately.

• Exit rate

  Exit rate is the share of views of a given page that were the last page of the session.

• Good bounce rate

  There is no universal good bounce rate.

• North star metric

  A north star metric is the single number a company chooses to represent the core value its product delivers to customers.

• Pageview

  A pageview is a single recorded view of a page on your site.

• Retention rate

  Retention rate is the share of users from a starting group who are still active at the end of a defined period.

• Time on page

  Time on page is how long a visitor spent on one page before moving to the next.

• Unique visitor

  A unique visitor is one person counted once within a reporting period, no matter how many times they visit or how many pages they view.

Traffic and attribution

• Attribution model

  An attribution model is the rule that decides which marketing touchpoints get credit for a conversion when a customer interacted with several before buying.

• Dark traffic

  Dark traffic is genuine human traffic whose origin analytics cannot see, because the referrer header was stripped and no campaign tag was present.

• Direct traffic

  Direct traffic is every visit that arrives with no referrer and no campaign parameters, so analytics has nothing to attribute it to.

• Landing page

  In analytics, a landing page is the first page a visitor sees in a session, whatever page that happens to be.

• Referrer spam

  Referrer spam is fake traffic sent with a forged referrer header so that the spammer's domain appears in your referral report and tempts you to visit it.

• UTM

  A UTM is a set of query parameters added to the end of a link so that analytics can tell where a click came from.

• UTM parameters

  UTM parameters are the five named query-string values that describe a campaign link: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content.

Privacy and tracking

• Cookie banner

  A cookie banner is the notice that asks a visitor's permission before storing or reading information on their device.

• Cookieless analytics

  Cookieless analytics measures website traffic without storing a cookie, a localStorage value or any other identifier on the visitor's device.

• Cookieless tracking

  Cookieless tracking is any method of recognising visits without storing an identifier in the browser.

• First-party data

  First-party data is information you collect directly from your own audience on your own properties: site behaviour, purchases, support conversations, and anything customers tell you.

• Server-side tracking

  Server-side tracking sends analytics events from your own backend rather than from the visitor's browser.

• Tracking pixel

  A tracking pixel is a tiny, usually invisible image embedded in a web page or an email.

Analysis methods

• Cohort analysis

  Cohort analysis groups users by something they share, usually the week or month they signed up, then tracks each group separately over time.

• Conversion funnel

  A conversion funnel is an ordered sequence of steps a visitor takes toward a goal, measured by how many people reach each step.

• Core Web Vitals

  Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to measure page experience: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.

• Heatmap

  A heatmap is a visualisation that overlays aggregate visitor behaviour onto a screenshot of a page, using colour to show intensity.

• Session replay

  Session replay reconstructs a visitor's session as a playable recording of what happened on screen.

Questions, answered.