Useful Digital Marketing Terms

These digital marketing terms are useful for understanding Google Analytics and what the data it is tracking.  These terms are metrics as well as dimensions used to analyze data.  Both are equally important to understand in order to make sure your digital marketing is performing as planned.

Metrics

Visits
When the behaviour of users on your site is tracked within that unique visits until they leave your site or the session expires after 30 seconds of inactivity.  This tracking happens when the Google Analytics tracking code is triggered by on a users entrance to the site.

New and Returning Visits
This refers to when Google Analytics tracks when a user has been to your site from that browser before.  It is done through Google Analytics tracking the unique user ID of that browser from a cookie that is added to the users browser.  If that user clears their cookies, the next visit will be counted as a new user.   In addition, the user will also be counted as a new user if they visit from a different browser.

Visitors
This metric refers to the number of visitors that comes to your site.  It can be new or returning visitors.  This number is not the same as the number of visits to your site.  The difference between the two is that number of visits accounts for all visits, while visitors refers to group of visits from one computer.

Bounce Rate
This metric refers to the percentage of visits that landed on one page on the site and did not interact with any other elements of the site.  Moreover, the default setting is that a session that is inactive for 30 seconds is a bounce.

Pageviews
The pageviews refers to the number of views of a page.  Unique pageviews is different from pageviews as it refers to the number of visitors to the page as opposed to the number of visits to the page.

Pages per Visit
Pages per visit refers to the number of pages a user makes in one visit.  You use this measure to show the depth of engagement that user has with your site.

Dimensions

Landing Pages
This refers to the page of your website that users arrive to your site at.

Exit Pages
This refers to the pages that users exit your site from .

Other Terms

Segments
This refers to ways you can drill down into the how users interact with your site and what characteristics or behaviours define their interactions.  This includes new versus returning visitors, where the traffic came from, whether the traffic was a paid or organic source.

Visitors Flow
This refers to the visual representations of how visitors flow through your website showing where they landed, and what pages they went to in order.  Additionally it shows what pages they exited the site from.

Dashboard
Dashboards refer to a view that shows data related to how users interacted with your site.  The predefined dashboards included in Google Analytics that most people see when they open their account in Google Analytics.  You can create custom dashboards to track specific goals as well.

Traffic Sources
This refers to the specific place that sent a hit to your site, what the specific source and medium was.  The types of traffic are organic, referral (external sites that link users to your site), direct (show as none, people who directly enter your website url), or cost per click  or paid advertising such as Google AdWords.

Goals
Goals refers to  the micro and macro goals that you want to achieve with your site.  These goals can include URL destination (measuring visits to set pages, time on site (measuring how many users spend more than a specific amount on your site), pages/visit (measuring how many users visit a specified number of pages per visit), and ecommerce ( for example measuring the data for products sold).

Keyword
This refers to the words and phrases that users entered to find your site in Search Engine Results Page.

Events
This refers to specific interactions with graphics or links on your site that you want to track.  These track triggered macro and microconversions.