Jay LeonardFollowing you will find a Glossary of the most commonly used words in SEO, PPC and Google Analytics
AdWords (Google): AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Shown on the right column (and frequently on the first three SE results. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.
The Alexa Rank is an indicator about how a site ranks, among the billions of existing sites, with regards to traffic a site receives, and being 1 the best value. Above 5.000.000 is already fair and above 500.000 is already very good. IMB.com has AR=416, compared to www.ibm.com/es/ which keeps its parents AR=416! Amazon.com has AR=25. www.iberia.es has AR=6883 (Oct. 2009).
Analytics (Google): Google Analytics is a free web traffic analysis service provided by Google. It shows you how people found your site and how they explored it. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.
Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
Through the use of Google Analytics analysis, poor performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position.
Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file.
Av. # of pages: Average Number of Pages a visitor views on a website during one visit
Bounce Rate: Tabel header. Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.
Clicks: Table header. In the context of this report refers to the clicks on links registered by Google Analytics in Google AdWords. Although it could be also a click on any link of the website in Google Analytics
Contact: Table header. Number of requests submitted through the contact form.
Conversion rate: In internet marketing, conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.
Successful conversions are interpreted differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers, for example, a successful conversion may constitute the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, however, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download, or other activity that occurs due to a subtle or direct request from the content creator for the visitor to take the action.
In our case, conversion is measured by counting the number of web form download and contact request.
Cost: In the context of this report refers to the monthly amount paid for PPC in Google Adwords.
CPC: Cost per click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website.
Direct: Table header. The percentage of direct traffic sources. Basically a visitor that types your web site domain name directly in the browsers address bar, uses it as the default page, or any other link stored locally on the users PC.
Download: Table header. The number of requests for accessing the DocPath downloads documents page.
Entry (Landing) Pages: The page visitor enters a web site. In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.
In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page will also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can measure advertisement effectiveness based on relative click-through rates.
In our results from Google Analytics the landing page is the entry point into the web through direct entering the URL, reference sites, organic or paid searches, etc.
Exit Page: The page a visitor leaves the website. The fact that the user is leaving the page may be considered as a negative indicator but is also a valuable information, as it shows us what visitors were finally interested in before they left the web site. Improving this page may improve the conversion rate.
External links are usually created to enhance the websites visibility but are also very useful for improving the Google Page Rank and page search engine positioning for generic or specific search terms.
The Google Page Rank gives and indication on the “value” that Google assigns to a given page. Normally the home page is the best indicator of the general website value. The rank ranges from 1-10, being 10 a value that very few pages achieve. A value of 3 would be fair and 5 already a good value. Values above 6 are very good and a PR above 8 is considered extraordinary Eg. www.IMB.com has PR=8, compared to www.ibm.com/es/, which has a PR=6! Amazon.com has PR=9. (Oct. 2009). www.iberia.es has PR=8 (Oct. 2009).
Keyword: See Search Term
Keyword positioning: Number representing the row this keyword is positioned in search engines. By default usuallt 10 positions are returned per page. Page 1 would have 10 results. Users tend not to pass page 3 of the SERP’s.
Keywords (NOT paid = Google organic): This list helps understanding which search terms produce most traffic, and more importantly, whether there are any search terms that we would expect to be found for, but are not listed. This is the base, together with the Search Term positioning report, for planning SEO activities.
Keywords (paid = Google Adwords): This list helps understanding which search terms, used within the paid advertising campaigns, produce most traffic. Taking conversion rates and bounce rates into account indicates the effectiveness of the keywords. Bear in mind that the list is limited to the words used in the Adwords keyword list!
KPI: – Key Performance Indicator: – are financial and non-financial measures or metrics used to help an organization define and evaluate how successful it is, typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals. KPIs can be specified by answering the question, “What is really important to different stakeholders?”.
The KPIs differ depending on the nature of the organization and the organization’s strategy. They help to evaluate the progress of an organization towards its vision and long-term goals, especially toward difficult to quantify knowledge-based goals.
A KPI is a key part of a measurable objective, which is made up of a direction, KPI, benchmark, target, and time frame. For example: “Increase Average Revenue per Customer from $10 to $15 by EOY 2010″. In this case, ‘Average Revenue Per Customer’ is the KPI.
Navigational Summary: “See Appendix 1 – Additional, Specific Queries”
Objectives: Objectives are targets set that should me meaningful to the business and measurable. Objectives can be of very different nature. In our case, naming just a few examples:
- Position one or a number of search terms (I have proven to you how this can be done creating some specific content with the page print-output-formats.aspx. This page is the source of an important part of the traffic coming from Search Engines.
- Increase visibility of a specific program or solution (E.G. with press releases, and other paid advertising).
- Increase the number of download requests.
- Increase the number of web contact requests.
- Increase the number of phone contact requests (It may be a good idea to have a distinct phone number on the web site).
- Improve the bounce rate of certain pages (visitors that view one page, but do then leave the web site.
- Find out why visitors abandon specific pages and create page variants for split testing.
The objectives are Key Performance Indicators and are targeted towards improving the conversion rate of a web site.
Organic search results: Search engines include advertisements in the first lines and at the right side of their results. These are the paid ads. The remaining results are positioned “naturally” of “organically” because of the value the SE assigns a specific web site page.
Organic positioning: see SEO
Paid (Results): Search engines include advertisements in the first lines and at the right side of their results. These are the paid ads. The remaining results are positioned “naturally” of “organically” because of the value the SE assigns a specific web site page.
PPC: Pay per click (PPC), also known as SEM, is an Internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content sites, such as blogs, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. At the moment in time we only use Google Adwords Search Network.
Reference Sites: Table header. These are sites that have a link to one of your web site pages. In GAN are considered one of the traffic source types and any click registered.
SE: – Search Engine – Google, Yahoo and Life are the most known Search Engines used to search for information on the internet.
Search Engine Positioning: see SEO
Search Term: (Synonym for Keyword). Any number of words or a phrase used to search for information using a SE.
SEM: Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. Examples are Google Adwordd and Yahoo Search Marketing. The ads are returned in the first lines and at the right side of their results.
SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
SERP: A Search Engine Results Page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.
Top Content Pages: List of pages that produce most traffic to your site. It is important to also take the bounce rate into consideration.
Traffic Sources: Answers the question…How do visitors reach your site? The main grouping by traffic types is direct traffic, search engines and reference sites.
Traffic Types: See Traffic Sources
Visits: Table header. Total number of visits of the web site. This number also includes visits of users that return again.
Unique Visitors: A unique visitor is a statistic describing a unit of traffic to a Web site, counting each visitor only once in the time frame of the report. This statistic is relevant to site publishers and advertisers as a measure of a site’s true audience size, equivalent to the term “Reach” used in other media.
Other resources
- This is a WIKI specialized on SEO http://www.seoglossary.com/ – Search for the terms you want to know and it will search on this site only, getting rid of all the clutter you usually have when searching in Google.
- This is an online IM Glossary http://www.lazworld.com/glossary.html
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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This was GREEAT information! I had to print it out. I appreciate how clear the concise the information was presented. I now know more about google analytics – terms such as SERP and bounce rate. Thank you Mr. Kline
To Andrew W. Klein: You may want to issue a copyright complaint with Google for this post on G+ https://plus.google.com/110906975215081922391/posts/MM9qHFFPFiP
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I would not mind if he had linked back to the original source, but that’s unethitical and I have filed a complaint with Google