Web Analytics Terms

Here you can find Web Analytics Terms as below:

Visitors / Sessions
When someone visits your web site, your visitor count is incremented by one and a new visitor "session" is started. All actions taken beyond the first one are attached to that visitor session. Sessions "expire" after 30 minutes of inactivity. This means if the visitor leaves and comes back again a few hours later, or they remain on your web site but don't do anything until at least 30 minutes later, your visitor count for the day will be increased again.

Unique visitors
Your unique visitor count will only be incremented when a visitor comes to your site for the first time that day. If they visit your site five times in one day, your normal visitor count will be incremented by 5, but your unique visitor count will only be incremented by 1. Clicky determines uniqueness by a combination of cookies and IP address.

New visitors
This is a sub-set of unique visitors. It represents how many of your unique visitors are first time visitors.

Actions
Most services only track page views, but Clicky also tracks file downloads, outgoing links, and javascript events. We group all of these into a term we call "actions". The actions count gives you a much more thorough and accurate picture of visitor activity.

Average time spent
The average amount of time spent on your web site, per visitor.

Total time spent
This figure represents how much cumulative time was spent on your web site across all visitors for the day. If your site gets a decent amount of traffic, this value is typically much larger than "1 day".

Bounce rate
The traditional definition of a 'bounce' is a visitor who only views one page on your site and then leaves. However, we do not feel this is a good way to define this metric, as there are plenty of sites whose goal is one page view - e.g. a blog post linked to from Facebook. Clicky instead relies on the visitor's time-on-site - if a visitor is on your site for at least 30 seconds (which our tracking code tells us) then we will say they are NOT a bounce, even if they only have one page view. However, we do honor the definition that any visitor who has more than one page view is not a bounce.

Traffic sources
This gives you a general break down of how visitors are arriving at your site, which we primarily calculate by analyzing a visitor's referrer data.

Direct - How many visitors arrived at your site with an empty referrer string. This usually means they typed in your address by hand or used a bookmark to get to your page.
Links - How many visitors arrived via a link from another web site, excluding search engines
Searches - How many visitors arrived by an external search engine
Media searches - How many visitors arrived from an image-specific search. Other engines and types may be supported in the future, hence the name "media", but for now we only detect Google, Yahoo, and Bing image searches.
Advertising - How many visitors arrived via advertisements you may be running. We determine this by looking at the domain of the referrer, or if they match a campaign you have setup in our system. If it is a major known advertising domain, or the domain matches certain patterns such as "ad", "ads", or "pagead", then we put the visitor in this category.
Email - How many visitors arrived via email. Only web mail is supported, however, because clicking on a link from within a program like Outlook will not send any referrer data to your site.
Syndication - How many visitors arrived via an web-based RSS readers, such as Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.
Social media - How many visitors arrived via popular social media sites. Supported sites include: twitter, pownce, youtube, myspace, facebook, orkut, digg, reddit, propeller, sphinn, mixx, newsvine, sk-rt, shoutwire, stumbleupon, popurls, fark, metafilter, techmeme, ma.gnolia, flickr, yahoo buzz, del.icio.us, furl, blinklist, dzone, hyves, nujij, ekudos, reporter.msn, and grubb.

Referrers
When you look at a web page, your web browser sends a whole bunch of data to that page, including something called the referrer. The referrer indicates what page (if any) "referred" you to the current page. For example, if you search for something on Google, and then click on one of the results, your web browser will use the URL of the Google search page as the referrer. This is how Clicky is able to determine what searches and other pages lead visitors to your web site, because our tracking code can access this referrer data. Any time you click a link on a web page, your browser sends the referrer data to the next page you end up on, even if it's on the same web site. Clicky ignores these "internal" referrers, however.

Organizations
A visitor's organization (and hostname) is determined by looking up their IP address in a third party database. It is not 100% accurate, but close to it. These values represent the company that "owns" that IP address. For example, if someone from Microsoft corporate headquarters visited your site, you would see "Microsoft" as their organization. Unfortunately, many home users can't be identified by anything more accurate than their ISP, which is not nearly as useful. This is why there is an option in your site prefernces to only show a visitor's organization if it is not an ISP. This filter looks for certain keywords in the organization's name, such as "internet", "broadband", "telecom", etc and hides the data if there's a match. This filter is not 100% accurate but enabling it helps the visitors with real organization details to stand out.

Hostnames
A visitor's hostname is what their IP address resolves to for a <="" a=""> lookup. For example, one of Google's IP addresses is 64.233.167.99. If a visitor with this IP address came to your web site, then their hostname would be displayed as "google.com". Please see Organizations for more information about this (it works the same way).

Outgoing links
An outgoing link is a link on your web site that points to another external web site. Clicky automatically tracks clicks on these links so you can see how your visitor's are leaving your web site and where you are sending the most traffic to. When a visitor clicks an outgoing link, that action will show up in their visitor session, and the total value for clicks on that link will be incremented by 1.

Source: Definitions