SEM Glossary | SEM::SME

SEM Glossary of keywords

Avg. Session Duration: Provides a top-level view of how long users are spending on your website. For example, if you had two users, one that spent three minutes on your website and another that spent one minute, then you would have an average session duration of two minutes. Google Analytics does not count time for the last page viewed during a session. This means that the average session duration will tend to be skewed lower than the actual amount of time people are spending on your website.
Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions with a single page view. Bounce rate can provide top-level insights about the performance of your content. For example, if you want people to travel on to view a subsequent page on your website, then you can aim to lower your bounce rate. It’s also important to apply context when analyzing bounce rate, since some pages will deliver all of the information somebody is looking for on a single page, for example, a store locator or a blog post.
Conversion: Refers to an activity carried out by the user which fulfils the intended web page purpose (product purchase, download, newsletter subscription etc.)
Entrances: the number of times visitors entered your site through a specified page or set of pages.
Entry (or Landing) Page: The first page that someone views during a session is known as an entrance. You can see the number of times a page was viewed first using the ‘entrance’ metric. This metric is similar to sessions but can vary when multiple hit types are sent to Google Analytics.
Exit Point: the exit point is the last page viewed by a website visitor
Goal Completion: When a user converts for a particular goal during a session they’ll be counted as a goal completion. If a goal is completed multiple times during a user’s session, it will only be counted as a single conversion.
Impressions: For standard organic listings (10 blue links), an impression is recorded even when it hasn’t been scrolled into view. So, in the 10 blue links, if your listing is #9 and below the fold, it still counts as an impression if the search result page was loaded.
Landing Page: The landing page is the first page viewed during a session, or in other words, the entrance page. It can be useful to review your landing pages to understand the most popular pages people view as they navigate to your website. This can be used to identify potential opportunities to cross-promote or feature other content from your website.
% New Sessions: the percentage of visits that were first time visits (from people who had never visited your site before)
New User: People that visit your website for the first time in the selected date range. Since users are based on the Google Analytics tracking code and browser cookies, it’s important to highlight that people who cleared their cookies or access your website using a different device will be reported as a new user.
Page Impression: a page is loaded or reloaded by a user.
Page View: A page view is reported when a page has been viewed by a user on your website. In the Google Analytics pages report, by default, your pages are ordered by popularity based on page views. This allows you to see which content is being viewed most often.
Pages/Session: the average number of pages viewed during a visit to your site.
Position: Typically the position in the result set in response to a user query. The user may not have scrolled to the page where the listing would have been shown.
Sessions: A single visit to your website, consisting of one or more page views, along with events, ecommerce transactions and other interactions. The default session timeout is 30 minutes, which means that if someone is inactive on your website for over 30 minutes, then a new session will be reported if they perform another interaction, for example, viewing another page.
Visits: the total number of visits to your site, from unique or repeat visitors.
Unique Visitors: the number of unduplicated visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.