Analytics: terms A to Z
Every website analytics term explained in plain English: sessions, bounce rate, conversions, UTM links, GA4, and more.
Analytics reports are full of numbers, but what do they actually mean? This page defines every term you'll encounter, so your monthly report makes sense and you can ask better questions.
A to C
| Term | Plain-English definition |
|---|---|
| Acquisition | How visitors find and arrive at your website: organic search, paid ads, social media, email, direct, referral. |
| Average session duration | The average amount of time visitors spend on your site in a single session. |
| Bounce rate | In GA4: the percentage of sessions that were not engaged, the exact inverse of engagement rate. In older Universal Analytics it meant something quite different: a visit to one page and out. It isn't shown in most GA4 reports until you add it. |
| Channel | A category of traffic source, e.g. Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search, Social, Email, Referral. |
| Conversion | A completed goal: a purchase, a form submission, a phone call click, a newsletter sign-up. GA4 now calls these key events. See Conversions & goals explained. |
| Conversion rate | The percentage of sessions in which someone completes a desired action. E.g. 1,000 sessions and 30 purchases = 3% conversion rate. On screen in GA4 this is Session key event rate; there is also a User key event rate that divides by users instead, so the same site can show two different "conversion rates". |
| Cookie | A small file stored in a browser that lets analytics tools recognize returning visitors and track behavior across sessions. |
| Core Web Vitals | Google's set of speed and user-experience metrics. The current three are LCP (loading), INP (responsiveness) and CLS (visual stability). INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. See Core Web Vitals explained. |
| Custom dimension | A user-defined data attribute added to analytics tracking, e.g. "logged-in user," "subscription plan." Requires setup. |
| Custom event | A specific user action you track beyond the defaults, e.g. video plays, PDF downloads, scroll depth. |
D to G
| Term | Plain-English definition |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | An overview screen in an analytics tool showing key metrics at a glance. |
| Data layer | A JavaScript object on your website that temporarily stores data for tools like Google Tag Manager to pick up. |
| Dimension | A descriptive attribute of your data, e.g. page title, country, device category, traffic source. |
| Direct traffic | Visits where the person typed your URL directly, used a bookmark, or the source couldn't be identified. |
| Engaged session | A GA4 metric: a session that lasted 10 seconds or longer, or included at least one key event, or included two or more page or screen views. More meaningful than the old bounce rate. |
| Engagement rate | In GA4: the percentage of sessions that were "engaged" (see above), calculated as engaged sessions ÷ total sessions. GA4's bounce rate is its exact inverse. |
| Event | In GA4: any interaction tracked, page view, scroll, click, form submission, purchase. Everything is an event. |
| Filters | Rules applied to analytics reports to narrow data, e.g. show only traffic from the UK, or exclude your own team's visits. |
| GA4 | Google Analytics 4. The current version of Google Analytics and the replacement for Universal Analytics. Event-based, not session-based. See What is Google Analytics (GA4)?. |
| Goal | The Universal Analytics term for an action you counted as valuable. GA4 first called these "conversions" and now calls them "key events." |
| Google Search Console | A free Google tool showing search performance data, which queries bring people to your site, click-through rates, and technical issues. See What is Google Search Console?. |
| Google Tag Manager (GTM) | A tool that manages tracking scripts and tags on your site without requiring code changes for each one. See What is Google Tag Manager?. |
One rule instead of ten table rows: each tool sees its own side of the click and nothing past it. That is why a ranking question can only be answered in Search Console, and a conversion question only in Analytics.
Read this as text
Search Console covers everything up to the moment somebody clicks: how often your pages appeared in Google’s results, what position they held, and which search terms people typed to find them. It also reports indexing and technical errors: all things that happen before a visit exists.
Google Analytics starts the instant somebody arrives: which pages they read, how long they stayed, where else they came from, and whether they filled in a form or bought something.
The click is the handover, and it is why the two tools cannot substitute for each other. Analytics never saw the search result, so it cannot tell you your ranking. Search Console never saw the visit, so it cannot tell you whether that visitor bought anything.
One partial exception: if you link the two, some Search Console query data appears inside Analytics. It is a copy of the same report, not Analytics seeing across the boundary.
H to M
| Term | Plain-English definition |
|---|---|
| Heatmap | A visual representation of where visitors click, scroll, or spend attention on a page. Tools like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity generate these. |
| Impression | One instance of a page appearing in search results. Tracked in Google Search Console. |
| KPI | Key Performance Indicator. A metric that matters most to your business goals, e.g. leads, purchases, phone calls. |
| Landing page | In analytics: the first page a visitor sees during a session, not necessarily your homepage. |
| Metric | A numerical measurement: page views, sessions, bounce rate, revenue. |
| Monthly active users (MAU) | The number of unique users who visited your site in a given month. Names vary by tool: GA4's metric is Active users, which its reports simply label Users, counted over whatever date range you pick. |
N to R
| Term | Plain-English definition |
|---|---|
| New users | Visitors your analytics tool hasn't seen before, as far as it can tell. Recognition normally relies on a cookie or a device identifier, so treat the number as an estimate. |
| Organic search | Traffic from unpaid search engine results. |
| Page view | One instance of a page being loaded by a visitor. |
| Paid search | Traffic from paid search ads: Google Ads or Bing Ads. |
| Property | In Google Analytics, the container that holds your reports and data. You add a "data stream" to it for each website or app you want to measure. |
| Referral traffic | Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website. |
| Returning user | A visitor the tool has seen before, usually recognized by a cookie. Clearing cookies or switching device makes the same person look new. |
S to Z
| Term | Plain-English definition |
|---|---|
| Scroll depth | How far down a page a visitor scrolled. GA4 records a scroll event on its own the first time someone reaches 90% of a page; finer thresholds such as 25%, 50% and 75% have to be set up separately. |
| Segment | A subset of your data filtered to a specific group, e.g. "mobile users from the UK who purchased." |
| Session | One visit to your website. A session starts when someone arrives and ends when they leave or after a period of inactivity. |
| Source / Medium | The origin of traffic (e.g. google / organic, instagram / social, newsletter / email). |
| Traffic | The total number of visits to your website over a given period. |
| Universal Analytics (UA) | The previous version of Google Analytics, before GA4. Standard properties stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, and from July 2024 the data, the interface and the API were gone. |
| Users | Individual visitors to your site, recognized by a cookie or a device identifier. One user can have multiple sessions. See Users vs sessions vs views. |
| UTM parameters | Tags added to a URL to track the source of traffic in analytics. E.g. ?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email. See UTM links for campaign tracking. |
| Vanity metric | A metric that looks impressive but doesn't directly relate to business outcomes, e.g. raw page views with no conversion context. See Vanity metrics vs meaningful metrics. |
| View | In GA4: a page or app screen someone saw, a page_view event on the web, a screen_view event in an app. In older analytics, a "view" was a filtered subset of property data. |
Common questions
Related guides
Was this page helpful?
Go deeper on chykalophia.com
Done for you
Rather not do this yourself?
This is everyday work for our team. Book a free discovery call and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth paying someone for.
Already a client? Email support@chykalophia.com.
Last updated