Most used terms in Analytics

When implementing web analytics, a number of important terms and concepts need to be kept in mind. These include the following:

· Metrics

Metrics are indices or measurement standards used to gauge the performance of a website. Every web analysis is conducted by using a lot of different metrics, each of which measures and assess a different aspect of a website. On its own, the result of a metric may be indecisive. However, when put together, the results of multiple metrics can give a complete picture of web performance.

· Hits

Hits are also known as impressions. A hit or impression is registered when a user requests a file and your server delivers it. Such a file may be a word document, an image file, a download of content or even a file like JavaScript. If a page with four images is opened by a user, five hits will be registered on the server.

Therefore, hits are recorded for every request, regardless of whether it results in a positive action from the user, like a purchase or a sale. For this reason, many web analyst experts assert that counting the number of hits is not one of the most reliable ways to gauge the performance of a website.

· User sessions

A single user session is classified as the time the user took to browse a website in one go. By ‘one go’, it means that for the visit to count as a session, the activities performed have to be completed in a specified period of time. On average, one visit is determined by 30 clicks in 30 minutes.

· Page tracking

Page tracking is a very important metric because it tells you the number of views one particular page had in a predefined timeframe. This allows you to assess the performance of the content on that page.

· Page tagging

Page tagging helps web analysts determine the number of views a single page gets. For this metric, experts categorize a number of pages together in a group form to make it easy for them to be tracked.

There are plenty of other terms, that are frequently used in web analytics. These will be discussed in the later to promote a better understanding of the concepts of web analytics.