Common Terms

Report Suite

A report suite defines the complete, independent reporting on a chosen website, set of websites, or subset of website pages. Usually, a report suite is one website, but it can be a global segment where you have combined several sites' numbers to get totals. Also, a report suite can be smaller than a website, if want to run reports for a portion of your site.

For example, if logged-in users and non-logged-in users use your site differently, and you have different people looking at the reports for each group, you can categorize report suites based on pages that require authentication and pages that do not.

When you log in, you select one report suite to use (except when you use roll-ups that combine report suites).

Metric

Quantitative information about activity on your website, such as Views, Click-throughs, Reloads, Average Time Spent, Date, Units, and so on.

For more information, see Metrics.

Dimension

Descriptions or characteristics of metric data that can be viewed and compared, such as gender, month, age, loyalty, monitor resolution, and so on.

Report

The basis of marketing report functionality. You can run online reports on all data collected.

For more information, see Report Types.

Page View

A single web page that loads in a visitor's browser. A page view is one execution of the JavaScript for that page. The system accurately counts how many times a page is loaded, even if the visitor refreshes the page frequently or uses the Back and Reload browser buttons. A page view counts the entire page, not individual elements or hits.

Visit

A sequence of page views in a sitting. The visit ends only after 30 minutes of inactivity or after 12 hours of continuous activity. (This time measurement is the marketing analytics industry standard.) Visits are tracked by cookies. A visit begins when a viewer accesses a page. A visit is sometimes referred to as a session, but it is not a browser session. Going to a different site, closing the browser, or even rebooting the computer does not end a visit.

If the inactivity time-out occurs while a visitor is reading a page, the visit closes and is processed. A new visit starts when the visitor clicks through to another page.

If the date changes during a visit, such as when visiting a site at midnight, the visit is attributed to the day on which the visit began.

Unique Visitor

Unique Visitor reports denote the number of different people who visit your site during a chosen time. There are six different Unique Visitors reports:

• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Yearly

While one person might visit your site multiple times and views multiple pages during a specified period, the Unique Visitors report records that person as one unique visitor.

Visitor De-Duplication: Data collection de-duplicates visitors based on the report title, independent of the calendar selection. For example, a visitor that visits four separate days in a reporting week is counted as one in the Weekly Unique Visitor Report. In a Daily Unique Visitors Report spanning that week, the same visitor is counted four times.

Conversion (Success) Events

Conversion events are the activities on your site that you want people to do (key performance indicators). For an e-commerce site, conversion events might be a detailed product view, a checkout, or a purchase. For a lead generation site, the event might be a form completion. Conversion events are counted on the site and have their own reports that show how many of them happened. These events also become metrics to put in other reports and can show why the conversion events happened, or what contributed to their happening.

The exception to the rule of one event becoming one metric is the Purchase event, which spawns three metrics: Revenue, Orders and Units.

More conversion metrics exist that are not defined here, but conversion metrics form the foundation of your marketing analytics, upon which other metrics and reports are built.

Channel

Defined sections or categories of your site. Web sites that have two main categories, such as weather and news, have two channels. You can group statistics for all page views that occur within any channel in your site.