Recently Google Analytics was hooked up to Gazator. I’ve been having fun digging through the reports and making sense of them. Tracking data in web analytics is a lot like sorting out a budget revision; there’s something strangely satisfying in it, but it’s hard to say exactly what.

As I mentioned in my previous post, being absolutely clear on what words mean matters. Web analytics are a perfect example of this — mix up visits with views, the analysis of the results will be completely misleading, and life can become difficult. In the interest of living a long, comfortable life, here are some common terms to know when talking about web analytics.

Hit: A hit is the retrieval of any information from the web server. Generally speaking, hits are no longer used as a measurement of a site’s popularity. This is because a visit to a single page doesn’t necessarily register as one hit; it can register as many. For instance, a webpage with five graphics would register as six hits (five hits for the graphics plus one for the page). As a result, hit numbers tend to be inflated.

Page View: A view is registered when a visitor accesses a page on the website. You can have far more views than visitors (because each visitor is likely to view more than one page).

Impression: There seems to be some discrepancy about this. Impression is sometimes used as an alternative for page view, e.g. page A received 100 impressions last month. It can also be used in terms of ad impressions, e.g. ad X received 500 impressions.

The important point to note is that if there are three ads on the page, the page may receive one impression but there will be three impressions for the ads (i.e. one impression for each ad). This can lead to some confusion and is a great example of why everyone having the same definition when talking about web analytics is important.

Visit: A visit occurs when a visitor comes to the website. Even if the visitor navigates around the site, it still only counts as one visit. The visitor is tracked by their IP address. If the visitor is idle for 30 or more minutes and then becomes active again, most software will count this as the start of a new visit.

Absolute Unique Visitor: Absolute unique visits is a count of the individuals who have visited rather than the frequency of the visit, and is looked at over a specific timeframe. So, suppose you looked at a website over the past week. There might be 21 visits but only three absolute unique visits. This would mean that each visitor had gone to your website an average of seven times.

Bounce Rate: The rate at which people visit one page on the site and then exit from the same page without looking elsewhere on the site.

Referrer: Where the visitor came from to arrive at the website. For instance, Google is a common referrer.

The definitions above cover most of the terminology that Google Analytics uses, but you should consider some more research if you want to impress the IT department.

More Information

Web Analytics Terminology — Back to Basics Series: Clear descriptions of commonly used terms.

Data Quality Sucks, Let’s Just Get Over It: An assessment of the limitations of web analytics plus my favorite description of the internet ever.