Glossary of website analytics terms
Short explanations of the words you meet in the admin panel.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Visitor | One person on one device and network, recognized without cookies. See How visitors, visits and page views are counted. |
| Visit (session) | A series of page views by one visitor, ended by 30 minutes of inactivity. |
| Page view | One opening of one page. |
| Bounce / bounce rate | A visit with only one page view / the share of such visits. |
| Entry page, exit page | The first / the last page of a visit. See Entry pages and exit pages: where visits start and end. |
| Exit rate | The share of a page's views after which the visit ended. |
| Referrer | The web address of the page where the visitor clicked the link to your page. |
| Channel | A group of sources: direct, search engines, social networks, AI assistants, email, paid ads, other websites. See Traffic sources: search, social, email, paid, direct and referral. |
| Source / medium / campaign | The three main UTM tags: who, what kind of link, which campaign. See Campaign tracking with UTM parameters. |
| UTM tags | Parameters such as utm_source added to links to identify a campaign. |
| Click ID | A code (gclid, msclkid...) that ad networks add to links. |
| Conversion / goal | A visit that reached a page you defined as success. See Goals: track conversions such as sign-ups, orders and downloads. |
| User agent | The text a browser or robot sends to say what it is, for example "Mozilla/5.0 ... Chrome/130". |
| Bot, crawler, spider | A program that visits websites automatically. |
| Referrer spam | Fake visits that show a spam website as the referrer. |
| Beacon | The optional script that reports screen size and time on page. See Human verification: count only visitors who really use the page. |
| Client hints | Headers modern Chrome sends to describe the system exactly (for example Windows 11). |
| Heat map | A grid in which colour shows how busy each weekday and hour is. |
| CIDR range | A way to write a group of IP addresses, for example 10.0.0.0/8. |
| Retention | How long statistics are kept before they are deleted automatically. |
| Soft 404 | An error page that is sent with status 200, so it is not recognized as an error. |
Last updated