Analytics glossary
Every analytics, SEO, and privacy term you will run into, defined in plain English with practical context.
Metrics
Bounce rate
The percentage of sessions where a visitor viewed one page and left without clicking, scrolling meaningfully, or triggering any event.
Engagement rate
The percentage of sessions that showed real activity, such as a second pageview, a conversion event, or spending meaningful time on the page.
Pageview
A single load or view of a page on your site. The most basic unit of web analytics, counted every time a page renders for a visitor.
Session
A single visit to your site: the group of pageviews and events one visitor generates from arrival until they leave or go inactive.
Unique visitor
An individual person counted once within a time period, no matter how many sessions or pageviews they generate.
Session duration
How long a visit lasted, measured from the first pageview to the last recorded activity in the session.
Pages per session
The average number of pages viewed in a single visit, calculated as total pageviews divided by total sessions.
Exit rate
The percentage of views of a page that were the last page of the session, showing where visits end.
Scroll depth
How far down a page visitors scroll, usually reported as the percentage of the page height reached, such as 25, 50, 75, or 100 percent.
Event
A tracked interaction beyond a pageview, such as a click, signup, download, or video play, usually with a name and optional properties.
Acquisition
UTM parameters
Tags added to URLs (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and friends) that tell analytics tools exactly where a visitor came from.
Referrer
The URL of the page a visitor came from, sent by the browser and used by analytics tools to attribute traffic to its source.
Direct traffic
Visits with no known source: the visitor typed the URL, used a bookmark, or came from a link whose referrer information was stripped.
Organic traffic
Visitors who arrive from unpaid search engine results, as opposed to ads, referrals, social, or direct visits.
Channel
A grouping of traffic sources into buckets like organic search, paid search, social, email, referral, and direct for high-level reporting.
Campaign
A named marketing effort tracked in analytics, usually via utm_campaign, so all traffic and conversions from it can be measured together.
Attribution
The rules deciding which traffic source or campaign gets credit for a conversion when a customer was touched by several before converting.
Dark social
Sharing that analytics cannot attribute: links passed through chat apps, email, and DMs arrive with no referrer and look like direct traffic.
Behavior
Funnel
An ordered sequence of steps toward a goal, with the percentage of visitors completing each step, used to find where people drop off.
Retention
The percentage of users who come back after their first visit or signup, measured over days, weeks, or months.
Cohort
A group of users who share a starting point in time, such as everyone who signed up in the same week, tracked together over time.
Segment
A filtered slice of your traffic or users sharing a trait, such as mobile visitors, paying customers, or people from organic search.
User journey
The path a visitor takes through your site, from entry page through the sequence of pages and actions to exit or conversion.
Entry page
The first page a visitor sees in a session. Entry pages show where traffic actually arrives, which is often not the homepage.
Conversion
Conversion rate
The percentage of visitors or sessions that complete a desired action, such as signing up, purchasing, or submitting a form.
Goal
A specific action you define as a success in your analytics tool, such as reaching a thank-you page or triggering a signup event.
Micro conversion
A small action that signals progress toward a main goal, like a newsletter signup, pricing page view, or video watch.
Call to action (CTA)
The prompt that tells a visitor what to do next, such as a Start free trial button, and a primary lever for conversion rate.
Landing page
A page built to receive traffic from a campaign and drive one action, with a focused message and a single call to action.
Cart abandonment
When a shopper adds items to a cart but leaves before paying. Around 70 percent of carts are abandoned across e-commerce.
SEO
SERP
Search engine results page: the page of results shown after a query, including organic listings, ads, and features like AI answers.
Impressions
The number of times your page appeared in search results, whether or not it was clicked. Reported by tools like Google Search Console.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Clicks divided by impressions: the percentage of people who saw your search listing, ad, or link and clicked it.
Keyword ranking
The position your page holds in search results for a specific query, tracked over time to measure SEO progress.
Backlink
A link from another website to yours. Search engines treat backlinks from relevant, reputable sites as endorsements that help rankings.
Domain authority
A third-party score (0-100) estimating how likely a domain is to rank, based mainly on its backlink profile. Not a Google metric.
Core Web Vitals
Google's page experience metrics: LCP for loading speed, INP for responsiveness, and CLS for visual stability. A minor ranking factor.
Crawl
How search engine bots discover pages by following links and fetching them for processing. A page must be crawled before it can rank.
Index
The search engine's database of processed pages. Only indexed pages can appear in results, and crawled does not always mean indexed.
Privacy
Cookieless analytics
Web analytics that counts visitors without storing cookies or identifiers on their devices, which is what removes the consent banner requirement.
First-party data
Data your business collects directly from its own audience and customers, on its own sites and products, rather than bought or borrowed.
Consent banner
The popup asking visitors to accept or reject cookies and tracking, required in the EU before non-essential identifiers are stored.
GDPR
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation, governing how personal data is collected and processed, with fines up to 4 percent of global revenue.
IP anonymization
Truncating, hashing, or discarding visitor IP addresses so analytics data cannot be traced back to an individual connection.
Do Not Track (DNT)
A browser signal requesting not to be tracked. Widely ignored and now deprecated; its successor is Global Privacy Control (GPC).
Experimentation
A/B test
An experiment showing visitors two versions of a page or element at random and measuring which converts better.
Statistical significance
A threshold indicating a test result is unlikely to be random noise, commonly set at 95 percent confidence in A/B testing.
Sample size
The number of visitors or conversions a test needs before its result can be trusted, calculated before the test starts.