Frequently used Google Analytics Terms (as defined by Google).
Average Page Depth: The average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session.
Average Time on Site
The average duration of a visit to your site.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
Keyword: A significant word or phrase, relevant to the web page or document in question.
Landing Page: The first page a user views during a session. It is also known as "Entrance Page."
Navigation: Describes the movement of a user through a website. It also indicates the system of available links and buttons that the user can use to navigate through the website.
New Visitor: 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.
Page: 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.
Pageview: 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.
Referral: A site that refers traffic to the site you are tracking. 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.
Referring Source: The URL of an HTML page that sends visitors to a site by means of a hyperlink.
Returning Visitor: Google Analytics records a visitor as "returning" when the _utma cookie (Google Analytics' tracking cookie) for your domain exists on the browser accessing your site.
Session: 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, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for 30 minutes.
Tracking Code: 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.
Unique Pageviews / Unique Views: 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.
Unique Visitors / Absolute Unique Visitors: Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. Unique Visitors are determined using cookies.
Visitor: 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.
