Google Analytics Terms Glossary

There is a lot of confusion amoung the terms for newcomers to analytics. To them a pageview, a visit and a click is one in the same. That’s why were hear at Online Marketing Analytics have decided to compile this glossary of terms for new Google Analytics users.

This will be an ever evolving document, slowing getting more in-depth and including every possible term over the next few months.

So take this away and study up!

• Visit - This is the number of unique sessions that are created by the piece of Google Analytics code that is on your webpage. A visit is actually made up of clicks and page views. Think of it like someone knocking on your door and coming into your house, then walking around in each and every room. One actual visit, but they had a look at every single page (room).
• Visitor - This is a session that is started by a unique user of your website. So keeping with the previous analogy, if one of your friends (Bob) comes and visits your house, goes with you to the shops and comes back to grab some beer - Bob is still the same visitor but he is on his second visit. Same goes with analytics - visitors can visit your websites multiple times after the 30 minute expiry period.
• Absolute Unique Visitor - These represent the amount of unduplicated (no matter the visits, they are only counted once) visitors to your website over a specific time period. Cookies are used to discern if someone is unique or repeat.
• Pageviews - These are a view of a particular page on your website that also has Google Analytics tracking code installed. Any reload/refresh is counted as another pageview. If a visitor views the same page more than once (homepage -> about us -> homepage) that is 2 views of the homepage.
• Unique Pageviews - This combines all the pageviews that were generated by the same visitor, during the same visit. The uniqueness comes from the total amount of sessions that included that pageview.
• Time On Site - This is calculated by subtracting the timestamps between the first and the last pageview of a visit. So if you landed on the homepage at 12:01, and the contact us page at 12:03, you spent 2 minutes on the website.
• Bounces & Bounce Rate - Now that we know how Time on Site is calculated, we can see how the bounce rate works. Bounces is the number of single page visits to your website. That means that once they landed on the website, they did not do anything else, either closed or press the back button. Obviously we want this number low. The bounce rate then is the percentage of single page visits over a specific period of time.
• New Visits - The amount of people that have never seen (visited) your website before. Based on cookies left by the Google Analytics code.