Do you receive reports from your Digital Marketing Agency and wonder what some of the data terms mean? Or do you sometimes look at your own analytics and just hope that you are interpreting the data correctly?
There are so many metrics available, it’s no surprise that users sometimes lose sight of information as they start to get deeper into the data.
Digital Marketing Data Jargon Buster
Our list of the most common data terms, what they mean, and why they are useful (or not)
Platform |
Data Term |
What it means |
Why it’s useful to know (or not) |
Google & Analytics |
Avg Page Load Time | The average time it takes for your site to load divided by number of pages on your site | If your pages don’t load in under 2.5 seconds you start to risk losing your visitors |
| Avg Redirection Time | If you have redirects set up on your site, this is the average time the redirects take to work | If your redirects don’t work, people leave before reaching the new site. If you have no redirects, this shows as 0 | |
| Avg Session Duration | The average length of time a user spends on your site in a session | A high session duration is often interpreted as indicating engagement. However, if your site is highly transactional, a lower figure may be better | |
| Backlink | When another website has put a link in their copy that refers a user directly to your site | Backlinks are used by Google like endorsements – they can work well for you…or work against you if not well managed. Find out more here | |
| Bounce Rate | The percentage of sessions where the visitor arrived at a single page and left the site without interacting | Low bounce rate is usually considered good, however, small sites will naturally have higher bounce rates than large ones. You could say that a high bounce rate indicates that the visitor found what they wanted as soon as they arrived at your site, so monitor this measure in line with your marketing strategy | |
| Campaign | A grouping of marketing activity e.g. Spring 22 launch, Watch promotion April 21, Summer Sale June 22 | You can get some great insight into how your campaign performs if you set up campaign tagged URLs within your marketing. Here’s a simple tool to set up Campaign URLs | |
| Channel | A high-level grouping showing where traffic that came to your site came from e.g. Social Media, Email, Organic Search | Knowing which channels work well for you helps you define the focus for your Digital Marketing. Be wary of mis-interpreting traffic tagged as “Direct” | |
| Citations | Listings sites such as Yell, Next Door and Bark | If you have consistent listings across multiple sites, you are more likely to appear for local search. Check yours here | |
| Countries | The Geography where the users visiting your site are located | This data point is taken from where the server each user is based, so you’ll sometimes see erroneous data in your reports. e.g. Ashburn in the US is a huge server farm used by some UK hosting sites | |
| Devices | The types of devices people were using when they visited your site e.g. Desktop, Mobile | The mix of traffic from mobile increases every year, so mobile responsiveness is important – particularly if you have a high mix of mobile users | |
| Direct | When people have typed your URL (website name) into the search bar, AND when Google can’t identify the source of a click | A high % of Direct traffic indicates either that your visitors know you, or that they are Privacy cautious. Here’s Google’s library on Privacy | |
| E-commerce | Used when you sell products online | E-commerce is a separate module in GA and should be set up as part of any E-commerce site build. It shows you revenue, transaction numbers and values and conversion rates and sales by product | |
| When people have arrived at your site from clicking through one of your emails or newsletters | Email traffic is a good measure of how engaging and intriguing your communications and newsletters are | ||
| Events | Everything that happens on a website is tagged as an Event | Events in GA4 are different to those in Universal analytics – check that your GA4 is set up correctly so that you can see year on year comparisons from July 2023 | |
| Exit pages | The last page your visitors viewed before leaving the site | If you are not converting visitors into calls or contacts, it’s worth studying exit pages as this shows you the last page being viewed before visitors leave the site | |
| Goals | The events on your site you determine to be a result. Usually Contact Us, Click to Call & or a Purchase. | It’s worth taking the time to have these set up correctly as it gives you clarity as to whether your visitors are moving through your sales funnel or not | |
| Keywords | The phrases that people type into search engines when looking for a business like yours | If you optimise your content to include phrases that people commonly use when looking for a business like yours, you are more likely to be found in search. Find out more here | |
| Landing Pages | The first page that a user lands on when arriving at your site | People often expect traffic to arrive at their home page, but this is often not the case – remember that every page can be a landing page! | |
| Medium | How the click to your site was generated eg Organic, CPC (Paid Ad) or Referral | The Source / Medium combination shows you the platform and method combinations – eg you can see Facebook Ads traffic separately to Google Ads | |
| New Users | The number of individual people who visited your site who had not been tagged as having visited before | Recent privacy changes, particularly on Apple devices mean that anyone who has opted out of cookies is seen as “new” | |
| Organic Search | When people have clicked on a search result in Google, Bing, Firefox etc to arrive at your site | Month on month improvements, whilst accounting for seasonal trends – are signs that your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is getting healthier | |
| Page views | The number of pages of your website that were viewed on your website (if someone visits your home page, reads your blog and then goes to contact us, that’s 3 views) | A high number of pages per session indicates that you are moving people through your website successfully. The health warning is that if users are not converting, a high pages per session may mean that users are getting a bit lost on your site | |
| Paid Search | When people have clicked on an Advert search result in Google, Bing, Firefox etc. You will have paid for this click | Paid Search is the most measurable of all Digital Marketing Activity, so track your performance data and never “set and forget” your Ads | |
| Referral | When people have arrived at your site from another site. As examples, this could be a listing site, a review site or where you have won a backlink | If Digital PR is one of your strategies, you should look out for referral traffic going up | |
| Search Engine | The platform that search queries are surfaced on eg Google, Bing, Microsoft Edge, Firefox | 92% of all searches are made on Google | |
| Sessions | The number of times your website was visited (An individual user may visit multiple times) | People tend to measure either Sessions or Users – be careful not to mix them up!
A high number of sessions per user suggests that maybe visitors are not finding what they want to know in one visit and are coming back for more information |
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| Site Content / All pages | The pages on your site that users interacted with | Helps you see the most frequently viewed pages. This is the best place to see which of your blogs are being read | |
| Site Speed | A combination of metrics measuring how quickly your website loads | Google considers Site Speed as part of it’s algorithm – fast site speed is seen as good | |
| Social | When people have arrived at your site from a Social Media channel (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram etc) | Month on month improvements, whilst accounting for seasonal trends – are signs that your Social Media activity is getting healthier | |
| Source | The platform that generated to click to your site e.g. Google, Facebook etc | Source is useful to know if you are focusing your marketing on specific platforms | |
| Users | The number of individual people who visited your site | Site visitors (Users) is a primary measure that your Digital Marketing is getting traffic to your website | |
Social Media |
Content Reach | The number of people who saw your posts | If Social is part of your marketing strategy, you want to see this number growing |
| Followers | The number of people who have opted in to see your content | Not all of your followers receive all of your posts – they still need to pass the relevancy test. | |
| Goals | The events on your site you determine to be a result. Usually Contact Us, Click to Call & or a Purchase. | It’s worth taking the time to have these set up correctly as it gives you clarity as to whether your visitors are converting or not. | |
| Impressions | The number of times your content was seen – some people see the same post multiple times | Social Media AI decides how relevant what you post is to your audience – the more impressions you get, the more relevant your content is considered to be. | |
| Page Reach | The number of people who saw your page or any content from your page (inc posts, Ads etc) | Reach is built by AI on sample data, so is good for trend analysis and comparison rather than specifics | |
| Reactions | The number of times people react to your content – this could be a like, comment, share or a link click | Social Media is all about creating interactions between people – the more reactions you generate, the more the platform sees you as posting great content | |
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Bounce | The number of inboxes that your email didn’t reach | As people change jobs, you can expect to see some bounces, but the number should be very small. |
| Click | The number of clicks from the email to your website | Tells you how effective your calls to action were. | |
| Open | The number of emails opened | Tells you how engaging / intriguing your subject lines were | |
| Sent | The number of emails sent | Many email platforms allow you to split test your message lines, so you can learn what type of messaging is most effective. | |
| Unsubscribe | The number of people who said they don’t want to hear from you by email any more | You can expect some unsubscribes every month, but in general if your content is properly segmented and well targeted you can keep unsubscribes low |
Summary
Your monthly reports are written so that you can see what’s going on in your business, not as a showcase for the Digital Marketing Agency – so if there’s anything you don’t understand, you should always ask. At WSI Digital Advisors, we pride ourselves on avoiding the jargon, so if you want a plain English conversation, contact us for a no obligation chat.
