Analytics Glossary: Conversion Funnel
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.
Analytics Glossary: Demographics
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.
Analytics Glossary: Latency
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.
Analytics Glossary: KPI – Key Performance Indicators
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.
Analytics Glossary: Sessionization
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.
Analytics Glossary: Frequency
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.
