Analytics Wiki
Short, plain-language definitions of the analytics, privacy and measurement terms you will meet across the guides.
An affiliate (affiliate partner/publisher) is a third-party that promotes your product and earns a commission for…
Anomaly detection is a method for spotting unusual behavior in your data—values that deviate from an…
An attribution model is a rule set (or algorithm) that splits conversion credit across the user…
Average Order Value (AOV) is the average revenue generated per completed order. It’s a simple but…
Average Session Duration is the mean time users spend in a session on your site or…
Behavior Flow is a path visualization in web analytics that shows how visitors move through your…
BigQuery is a serverless cloud data warehouse for running fast SQL on raw, event-level data. In…
Bounce Rate is the share of website sessions where a visitor lands on one page and…
A campaign in web analytics is a named set of marketing touches designed to drive traffic…
Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR) shows the share of shopping carts that were created but never converted…
Churn Rate is the percentage of users or customers who stop using your product within a…
A Click Event is a tracked user interaction when someone presses a clickable element on a…
Cohort analysis is a method to track how groups of users behave over time. A cohort…
Consent Mode is a consent-aware way of running your analytics and marketing tags so they respect…
Content Grouping is a tidy way to bucket pages and screens into logical sets—think “Blog,” “Docs,”…
Conversion is a completed action that delivers value to your product. It’s the moment a visitor…
Conversion Rate (CR) is the share of traffic that ends with a desired action — a…
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is the price you pay to get one conversion—a completed action you…
Cross-domain tracking is a method to recognize the same user across two or more separate domains…
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who clicked a link after seeing it. In…
A custom dimension is a user-defined attribute you attach to analytics hits to slice metrics by…
A custom event is a tracked interaction you define yourself—beyond a default Pageview, Session, or User—to…
A data layer is a vendor-neutral object between your app and analytics stack. It standardizes events…
Demographics in web analytics are user attributes like age and gender used to segment behavior and…
Device Category is a high-level grouping of traffic by hardware type—most analytics tools bucket sessions into…
Direct (a.k.a. “direct traffic”) is the bucket your analytics uses when a session arrives without a…
Display advertising is the practice of buying visual ad placements (banners, rich media, video) across websites…
Ecommerce Conversion Rate (ECR) is the share of visits that end with a purchase — a…
Email in web analytics is an acquisition channel: traffic that lands on your site after a…
An engaged session is a visit where the user clearly did something beyond a quick glance.…
Engagement Rate (ER) is the share of traffic that actually interacts with your site, not just…
Event count is the total number of recorded events on your site or app over a…
In web analytics, events are atomic records of user interactions that aren’t limited to page loads.…
An exit page is the last page a visitor sees before leaving your site in a…
Exit Rate shows how often a specific page is the last page in a user’s session.…
First Touch (aka first-touch attribution) is an attribution model that gives 100% of the conversion credit…
A first-party cookie (1P cookie) is a small key–value file set by the website domain you’re…
Form submission is a completed send of a web form—contact, signup, checkout, demo request—where the payload…
GA4 is Google’s event-driven analytics platform for websites and apps. Instead of sessions with pageview-centric hits,…
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a European Union privacy law that governs how organizations collect,…
In web analytics, Geography is a dimension that shows where traffic originates—typically by country/region/city. It’s not…
A Goal in web analytics is a clearly defined user action that represents business value. Think…
Goal Completion is the raw count of times a predefined Goal is finished on your site…
A Goal Funnel is the ordered path of steps a user is expected to take before…
In web analytics, a hit is the most atomic unit of activity: a single HTTP request…
A KPI is a metric you’ve explicitly promoted to decision-making status. It tracks progress toward a…
Last-touch attribution is an attribution model that gives 100% of the conversion credit to the final…
A lead is a visitor who has shared contact information or clear intent to be contacted—usually…
Linear attribution is a multi-touch attribution model that splits conversion credit equally across all touchpoints in…
LTV (User Lifetime Value) is the total net value a single user brings to your product…
A macro conversion is the primary business outcome you want users to complete — the moment…
Measurement ID is a unique identifier that routes events to the correct analytics dataset (property/stream). It’s…
Medium is the traffic “how” — the general channel type that brought a visitor to your…
A micro conversion is a small but meaningful user action that moves a visitor one step…
A Multi-Channel Funnel (MCF) shows how different traffic sources cooperate on the path to a conversion.…
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) is a method for assigning conversion credit across all marketing touchpoints in a…
Navigation Summary is a page-centric path analysis that shows where users came from before a specific…
New User / Returning User is a lifecycle split of the distinct user population within a…
Organic search is traffic that arrives on your site from unpaid search engine results. A user…
An outbound click is a user click on your site that sends them to a different…
Pages per Session (sometimes written as pages/session) is the average number of pages a user views…
A pageview is a single recorded load of a web page. Each time a browser requests…
Paid search is the practice of buying ad placements on search engine results pages (SERPs) to…
Paid Social is traffic and conversions you buy from social networks by running ads to targeted…
A Real-Time Report is a live view of what’s happening on your site or app right…
Referral (aka referral traffic) is any visit that lands on your site after a user clicked…
Revenue is the total money earned from your site’s sales over a period. In web analytics,…
Scroll Depth is a content engagement metric that shows how far a user scrolls down a…
A scroll event is an event fired by the browser (and captured by your tracking) whenever…
Segmentation is the practice of slicing analytics data into meaningful subsets so you compare like with…
Server-side tagging is a deployment pattern where your site or app sends event data to a…
A session is a continuous block of activity by one user on your site or app…
Session Frequency is how often a user returns and starts a new session within a defined…
Social media refers to platforms where users create, share, and discuss content in public or semi-public…
A tag is a small piece of client-side code (or a server call) that sends tracking…
A Tag Manager is a control plane for website/app tracking. In web analytics, this term most…
Time on Page is the elapsed time a user spends on a specific page within a…
A Tracking ID is a unique identifier used in analytics and ad platforms to route hits…
In web analytics, a transaction is a finalized commercial event with a unique order ID and…
A trigger is a rule that decides when a tag should fire. In web analytics and…
Unique Pageview is the number of sessions in which a specific page was seen at least…
Unique visitors (a.k.a. unique users, UUs) is the count of distinct people who visited your site…
In web analytics, a User is a distinct person–browser/app identity that interacts with your site or…
User Engagement Score is a composite metric—a weighted index that summarizes how deeply a user interacts…
A user journey is the sequence of real touchpoints a person experiences on the way to…
User retention is the percentage of users who come back and perform a meaningful action after…
A user segment is a defined subset of users grouped by shared attributes or behaviors so…
UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are short tags you append to a URL so analytics tools…