Benchmark:

• A standard by which something can be measured or judged. Assigning value to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) ensures your organization is measuring performance against similar goals.

Be sure you’re not setting benchmarked goals for your analytics or company that are impossible to obtain!

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Psychographics:

• Data used to build customer segments based on attitudes, values, beliefs and opinions as opposed to factual characteristics such as age and gender.

Many lead generation tools and services lump psychographics in with all of their demographics. Keep a keen eye out to watch for this both in separate categories and lumped in. It’s a valuable asset to have when deciding who to market very targeted products to. Avoid the egg on your face that could occur if you try to sell heavy metal music to conservative church-goers!

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Parameters:

• These are located in the URL immediately after a question mark and followed by an equal sign and a return value, known as name=value. Parameters indicate to a database what page a user is viewing. For example, www.mysite.com/product/widget.aspx?=1234. Here, widget is the product and 1234 is the product identifier.

This comes up a lot when using search functions embedded in websites. Be sure if you’re going to share the link with a customer or through a bulk email campaign to copy everything after the question mark. Sometimes if you just paste a link into an email or document and rely on the auto hyper link feature to add the link, it won’t add anything after the question mark. Be sure to use the menus of the program to insert the correct URL into the hyper link.

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Conversion Funnel:

• The series of steps that move a visitor towards a specified conversion event, such as an order or registration sign up. Funnels vary for every site, but best practice is to limit the depth a user must engage to convert.

A more common term for this is the ordering process. Here at PsPrint that’s what we usually say to describe the steps a consumer has to go through to place an order. It’s always a good idea to review your conversion funnel every year or so to make sure that the UI (user interface) is easy to understand and isn’t garbled with useless information or unnecessary steps. Remember that the easier it is to convert, the more likely the conversion is.

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Demographics:

• The physical characteristics of human populations and segments of populations often used to identify consumer markets. Demographics can include information such as age, gender, marital status, education or geographic location

Whenever you do a targeted marketing campaign, demographics are key! It’s a much better use of your time, efforts, paper, and budget to send your message to consumers who will be the most likely and interested in buying what you’re selling. You don’t want waste precious resources sending custom hot tub installation flyers to people in apartment buildings.

Many mailing list providers (e.g. PsPrint, USAData, etc) offer many demographic distinctions to choose from when renting a mailing list to market to. It’s also important to differentiate if you’re aiming for consumers at large or other businesses as it makes a huge difference in what kind of list you spend your money on.

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Latency:

• The average number of days between visits for a given visitor during a reporting period. For example, those who visit on average of every seven days.

You must make sure when analyzing the performance of specific marketing campaigns or sales to take the latency factor into account. Just because your campaign did poorly on sales at first does not mean that people won’t necessarily come back a few days later to check out what you’re advertising or make a purchase.

Remember that viral marketing inherently has a latency period for the message to spread.

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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KPI or Key Performance Indicators:

• Typically available in dashboards and provides an overall understanding of how the site is performing. Some KPIs include conversions, clicks and page views but are defined by the analytics user.

In my experience most dashboards can get pretty cluttered. My recommendation is to give yourself a comfortable period of time in using the program (a week, a month, whatever you’re satisfied with) and then review the content on your dashboard to remove anything you haven’t determined is a KPI and you don’t need to review on a daily basis.

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Sessionization:

• Refers to methods used to define a session (includes cookies, IP address, IP+Agent and others) telling the analytics system how to measure – or not measure – a series of page requests from the same individual or browsing machine.

In order to be able to track visitors accurately, you need to make sure you’re not counting the same visitor over and over again. This is where Sessionization comes in handy. Otherwise you could be counting yourself refreshing the page after making updates 10 times and falsely inflate your data.

Be wary of your analytics software and make sure that it’s not just counting page loads or else you get a grossly inflated number.

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Frequency:

• The number of times a visitor has visited a site during a reporting period. Average Frequency is the average of all visitors’ frequencies during the reporting period. Frequency is a retention metric and part of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis.

This goes hand in hand with bounce rate, which tells you how many people leave your website after visiting a certain page. Generating leads and driving traffic is important, but you have to make your website sticky… once they’re there, make them want to stay and come back. Monitor this with the frequency data and bounce rates.

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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Average Lifetime Value:

• The average of the lifetime value of a visitor or multiple visitors during the reporting period. Each visitor’s lifetime value is the total monetary value of a visitor’s past orders since visitor tracking began.

Since I recently had a snafu with my analytics, I’ve decided to start this bi-weekly series of glossary terms on analytics and share some things I’ve learned with you about it! Take notes, children!

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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.

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