Glossary of Common Urchin Terms

A more complete Glossary of Terms is available at Google Analytics.

Authentication: Technique by which access to Internet or intranet resources requires the user to enter a username and password.
Average Page Depth: The average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session. Bandwidth - The amount of data that can be transmitted along a communications channel in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second (bps) or bytes per second, where 1 byte = 8 bits.
Browsers: A browser, or more accurately, user agent, is the software used to access a website. Examples of user agents are "Explorer" (for Microsoft Internet Explorer), "Netscape" (for Netscape Navigator), and "Googlebot" (an automated robot that scours the web for website content to include in its search engine).
DNS Lookup (Reverse DNS Lookup): The process of converting a numeric IP address into a text name, for example, 63.212.171.4 is converted to www.googleanalytics.com.
Date Range: Google Analytic's Date Range feature allows you to view report data by an arbitrary time frame, from one day up to more than a year. Most reports have the Date Range feature available.
Default Page: The default page setting should be set to whatever the default (or index) page is in your site's directories. Usually, this will be 'index.html', but on Windows IIS servers, it is often 'Default.htm' or 'index.htm'. This information allows Google Analytics to reconcile log entries such as 'http://www.example.com/' and 'http://www.example.com/index.html', which are in fact the same page. Without the Default Page information entered correctly, these would be reported as two distinct pages. Only a single default page should be specified.
Directory: A directory is a virtual container for holding computer files. It is not merely a list of items, as the name would imply, but rather a key building block of a computer's storage architecture that actually contains files or other directories.
Domain: A domain is a specific virtual area within the Internet, defined by the "top level" of the address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The top level is the end of the address; example: "whitehouse.gov". In this example, the top-level part of the domain is ".gov", indicating a US government entity. The "whitehouse" part is the second-level domain, indicating where within the ".gov" domain the information in question is to be found. Other common top-level domains include ".com", ".net", ".uk", etc.
Domain Name System - (DNS): An Internet addressing system that uses a group of names that are listed with dots (.) between them, working from the most specific to the most general group. In the United States , the top (most general) domains are network categories such as edu (education), com (commercial), and gov (government). In other countries, a two-letter abbreviation for the country is used, such as ca ( Canada ) and au ( Australia ).
GIF: A graphics file type -- Graphics Interchange Format -- a compressed, bitmapped format often used on the web because of its good quality/compression ratio when used on certain image types, particularly those with large flat areas of color.
Hit: A hit is simply any request to the web server for any type of file. This can be an HTML page, an image (jpeg, gif, png, etc.), a sound clip, a cgi script, and many other file types. An HTML page can account for several hits: the page itself, each image on the page, and any embedded sound or video clips. Therefore, the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading.
IP Address: An identifier for a computer or device on a TCP/IP network. Networks using the TCP/IP protocol route messages based on the IP address of the destination. The format of an IP address is a numeric address written as four numbers separated by periods. Each number ranges from 0 to 255.
Keyword: A keyword is a database index entry that identifies a specific record or document. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. Unless the author of the web document specifies the keywords for her document (this is possible by using meta tags), it's up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that are believed to be significant. Words that are mentioned towards the top of a document and words that are repeated several times throughout the document are more likely to be deemed important.
Meta Tag: A special HTML tag that provides information about a web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.
Page: Also known as a web page, a page is defined as a single file delivered by a web server that contains HTML or similar content. Any file that is not specifically a GIF, JPEG, PING, JS (javascript), or CSS (style sheet) is considered a page.
Pageview: A page is defined as any file or content delivered by a web server that would generally be considered a web document. This includes HTML pages (.html, .htm, .shtml), script-generated pages (.cgi, .asp, .cfm, etc.), and plain-text pages. It also includes sound files (.wav, .aiff, etc.), video files (.mov, etc.), and other non-document files. Only image files (.jpeg, .gif, .png), javascript (.js) and style sheets (.css) are excluded from this definition. Each time a file defined as a page is served, a pageview is registered by Google Analytics.
Prior Unique Visitor: A Prior Unique Visitor is defined as a unique visitor to the website that returned during the specified Date Range after previously visiting your site, as identified by tracking devices such as cookies.
Profile: A Profile is a set of rules governing the production of a set of Google Analytics reports from log file data. Generally, there will be one Profile per domain/URL (e.g., www.googleanalytics.com). However, there can be any number of Profiles for any one source, as each may have different rules for exclusion or inclusion of certain log data elements.
Referral Errors: A referral error occurs whenever someone clicks on a link that points to your site but that contains a reference to a non-existent page or file. This action usually results in a "404 Not Found"-type error.
Referrals: A referral occurs when any hyperlink is clicked on that takes a web surfer to any page or file in another website; it could be text, an image, or any other type of link. When a web surfer arrives at your site from another site, the server records the referral information in the hit log for every file requested by that surfer. If a search engine was used to obtain the link, the search engine name and any keywords used are recorded as well.
Referrer: The URL of an HTML page that refers visitors to a site.
Reverse DNS: Name resolution software that looks up an IP address to obtain a domain name. It performs the opposite function of the DNS server, which turns names into IP addresses.
Search Engine: A Search Engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found, ranked according to relevance (or at least that's the intent). Although a search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google and AltaVista that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.
Session: A Session is a defined quantity of visitor interaction with a website.
By default in Analytics, a session is defined as the period of time during which visitors are interacting with your site and there has been inactivity for less than 30 minutes. After 30 minutes of inactivity, any further page views will be treated as a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.
The 30 minute default timeout can be changed with an addition to the tracking code.
Unique Visitor Session: A Unique Visitor Session is a quantity of visitor interaction with a website for which the visitor can be tracked and declared with a high degree of confidence as being unique for the time period being analyzed.
View Total: The View Total is the tally of items currently shown in the report. This total does not include items that are not shown. For example, if the report in question is showing 10 items out of 45, the View Total number represents the total for only the 10 items shown. Below the View Total listing is the Total, which represents the tally of all items in this report for this Date Range.
Visitor: A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website's perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.
Visitor Session: A Visitor Session is a defined period of interaction between a Visitor (both unique and untrackable visitor types) and a website. The definition of a Session varies depending on the type of visitor tracking employed.
Visitor Sessions: Visitor Sessions represents the number of times individual users visited your website over the course of a specified time period. This is a sum of First-time, Returning, and Unknown Sessions.
Visitors Total: Visitors is the number of Total Unique Visitors plus the number of Untrackable IP-based Visitors, which represents all individual visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.