The following glossary has been prepared to explain some of the terms used in Browser Media’s monthly reports. Please note that the list is presented in alphabetical order.
In 2014 Google changed some of the terminology in its analytics reports. The most notable change is that ‘visits’ has changed to ‘sessions’. Therefore ‘pages per visit’, ‘average visit duration’ etc have all changed to replace ‘visits’ with ‘sessions’. Despite this, the definition has not changed; please see ‘sessions’ below.
If you have any questions about any aspect of your report, please contact your account manager, who will be happy to help.
All / overall traffic
All traffic that has come to the site, from all sources. Overall traffic includes paid, organic, direct, and referral.
All non-paid traffic
All traffic excluding any paid advertising, or PPC. All non-paid traffic is made up of organic, direct, and referral.
Average session duration
The average time visitors spend viewing the site during a single session.
Bounce rate
The percentage of visits in which the site visitors view just one page of the website before leaving.
Content plan (also called Meta content plan)
A document detailing recommended page titles, headings and meta descriptions for all key pages.
Direct traffic
Traffic that comes straight to the website, by typing www.yourwebsite.com into the search bar or by clicking on a previously saved bookmark.
Domain Authority (DA)
Produced by a company called Moz, Domain Authority is a score that represents the ‘strength’ of a particular website and therefore tries to predict how well the site will perform in search engines. In an effort to replicate Google’s algorithms, it takes into account over 40 different aspects of an individual website.
Goal completion
A ‘goal’ is a specific website-based success event that is actively tracked and monitored. This could be the number of times visitors complete a ‘contact us’ form; request, view or download a brochure; add an item to a shopping basket; as well as purchase specific products. It can also include softer metrics such as a benchmark for average number of pages viewed or time spent on site.
Landing page
The first page a visitor views when arriving on the website.
Month-on-month (MoM)
Traffic compared to the previous calendar month.
Organic search traffic / organic traffic
Organic search traffic is all traffic referred by a search engine’s natural or organic SERPs (search engine results pages.)
Other traffic
Traffic from other sources (e.g. email marketing / social media).
Paid search traffic
All traffic generated through paid advertising or PPC (pay per click). This includes traffic generated both via a search engine’s advertising network (such as Google Adwords) and also traffic generated via web-based display advertising (such as using the Google Display Network).
Pages per session
The average number of pages visitors view during a single session.
Rankings
The position a website appears on a search engine results page (SERP) when searching for a specific term. For example, the first website on the list when searching using Google is said to rank at position one.
Referral traffic
Visitors that arrive at your site via another site that isn’t a search engine. For example, if people click through to your site from a link on a third party site, the traffic coming from that post is ‘referral traffic’.
Remarketing / Retargeting
Remarketing or retargeting means delivering targeted ads to users who have already been to a certain site or app. These ads can be based on the behavior those users displayed during their sessions.
Search traffic
Traffic that is referred to your site via search engines. There are two types of search traffic: paid search traffic and organic search traffic. Paid search traffic is driven to your site via PPC advertising (pay per click advertising) and is essentially a way of buying visits to your site. Organic search traffic is referred by a search engine’s natural or organic SERPs (search engine results pages).
Sessions (previously ‘visits’)
Mid-2014 Google changed some of the terminology in their analytics reports; sessions used to be termed ‘visits’. Despite the terminology change, the definition is still the same; it is defined as a group of interactions one user takes within a given time frame on your website. Google Analytics defaults that time frame to 30 minutes.
Visibility
A generic term for how visible a website is, generally interchangeable with the term ‘rankings’ above, meaning how often and where a website appears in organic or natural search engine results.
Year-on-Year (YoY)
Traffic compared to the same month, or time period, from the previous year.