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Web Analytics Glossary R to Z

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.

Returning Sessions - Returning Sessions represents the number of times unique visitors returned to your website during a specified time period.

Returning Visitors - The number of visitors who have been to your site prior to this report period and have come back. Returning visitors are determined by the cookie. Returning visitors are counted as unique returning visitors, that is, they are counted only once for the report period.

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.

Robot - A robot is a program that runs automatically without human intervention. Typically, a robot is endowed with basic logic so that it can react to different situations it may encounter. One common type of robot is a content-indexing spider, or webcrawler.

Rotating Log Files - Rotating log files is the process of ceasing to write to a particular log, renaming the file (usually by appending the date), possibly moving it to another directory, and then instructing the web server software to open a new log file for writing. The primary reason to do this is to keep the size of log files in check and to ensure that Urchin has processed all available data. To actually complete the log rotation, some web servers, like IIS, must be restarted (stopped/started).

Scalable - Quality of an implementation that allows it to grow as the usage of the service increases.

Screen Resolution - The size of the monitor

Script - A short computer program written in a simplified programming language, such as JavaScript, VBScript, or Perl.

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.

Search engine optimization - the process of choosing targeted keyword phrases related to a site, and ensuring that the site places well when those keyword phrases are part of a Web search.

Search Words - This report shows the search words and phrases that were used in search engines to reach your site. As this list grows, you will want to add missing words to your META KEYWORD tag on each page to increase search engine hits.

Server - A computer that hosts information available to anyone accessing the Internet or an internal intranet.

Session - A specific visit to a website that ends when the user has taken no further action after a given period of time - usually 30 minutes, indicating he or she is no longer `at’ the site; sessions are also referred to as `visits’ More

Site Domains - Site Domains are all the valid domains (URLs) that point to a given websites. For example, the Site Domains for Custom Fit Online Solutions are www.customfitonline.com and www.cfitmarketing.com

Software - The programs, routines, and symbolic languages that control the functioning of the hardware and direct its operation. Written programs or procedures or rules and associated documentation pertaining to the operation of a computer system and that are stored in read/write memory.

Source - Also know as source code. The actual text and commands stored in an HTML file (including tags, comments, and scripts) that may not be visible when the page is viewed with a web browser.

Spider - A spider is an automated program that "crawls" the Web, generally for the purpose of indexing web pages for use by search engines. Because most web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines have many spiders working in parallel.

Status Code - A status code, also known as an error code, is a 3-digit code number assigned to every request (hit) received by the server. Most valid hits will have a status code of 200 ("ok"). "Page not found" errors will generate a 404 error. Some commonly seen codes are in shown below in bold.

100 Continue
101 Switching Protocols
200 OK
201 Created
202 Accepted
203 Non-Authoritative Information
204 No Content
205 Reset Content
206 Partial Content
300 Multiple Choices
301 Moved Permanently
302 Moved Temporarily
303 See Other
304 Not Modified
305 Use Proxy
400 Bad Request
401 Authorization Required
402 Payment Required
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
405 Method Not Allowed
406 Not Acceptable
407 Proxy Authentication Required
408 Request Time-Out
409 Conflict
410 Gone
411 Length Required
412 Precondition Failed
413 Request Entity Too Large
414 Request-URL Too Large
415 Unsupported Media Type
500 Server Error
501 Not Implemented
502 Bad Gateway
503 Out of Resources
504 Gateway Time-Out
505 HTTP Version not supported

Time Offset - Is the amount of time that a server logging in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) needs to be adjusted to arrive at the correct local time for the site.

Time Zones - This report shows you the time zones that your visitors are in. This report will help you understand how your visitor base is distributed and if you have a particular customer base in a specific time zone.

Top-Level Domain - A Top-Level Domain (TLD) is the last part of a URL or domain name. For instance, the TLD of customfitonline.com is ".com", and the TLD of google.co.uk is ".uk".

Total Unique Visitor Sessions - The total number of Sessions from identified Unique Visitors during the time period (Date Range) being analyzed.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator is a means of identifying an exact location on the Internet.

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.

Unique Visitors - Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors for which the visitor can be tracked and declared with a high degree of confidence as being unique for the time period being analyzed. to your website over the course of a specified time period.

Unique IP Addresses - The number of unique IP addresses that visited the site in question during the given time frame. This is not to be confused with unique users. However, the count of unique IP addresses can serve as a lower bound for the number of unique users. IP addresses normally provide a fairly low count for unique users due to the fact that most mega proxies (AOL, MSN, ect) mask all of their users behind a single IP address and therefore appear as one user.

Unique Users - An unduplicated count of all individually identified machines that made a visit to a selected domain during a given analysis period.

Untraceable Session - A period of visitor interaction with a website for which the visitor cannot necessarily be distinguished as unique or not.

Usability Testing - Usability-testing is the measurement of how well a website aligns with the behaviours of online users, enabling them to complete their tasks efficiently, effectively, and satisfactorily.

User - A person who accesses a website; a user might be responsible for multiple visits to the site over a period of time, or make multiple visits during one session.

User Agent - A user agent is a generic term for any program used for accessing a website. This includes browsers (such as Internet Explorer or Netscape), robots and spiders, and any other software program that acts as an "agent" for a someone or something seeking information from a website.

Username - A Username is name used to gain access to a computer system. Usernames, and usually passwords, are required in multi-user systems. In most such systems, users can choose their own usernames and passwords.

Viral marketing - Spreading a brand message using word of mouth from a few points of dissemination. Typical techniques include using email messages, jokes, web addresses, film clips and games that get forwarded on electronically by recipients

Visit - A page request or a series of page requests by a visitor to a given domain. If, after the initial page request occurs and 30 minutes elapses without a subsequent page request, the visit session is closed. A new visit session is opened upon the next page request to the given domain.

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.

W3C - The W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, is a standards body dedicated to ensuring interoperability between all the varied system and network types that comprise the World Wide Web part of the Internet. The W3C log format is commonly used by several web server software systems, such as Microsoft IIS. For more information, see the W3C website.

Web Server - This is a vague term whose meaning must be determined by the context in which it's used. It will mean one of two things: The physical computer that acts as a server. This is a computer just like any other. It is called a server because its main function is to deliver web pages. Often there is nothing particularly special about a server's hardware, it's only a server because of the software it runs. The software that serves the web pages (HTML). This special software runs all the time (it is a daemon-- pronounced demon) and listens for requests for web pages. When a request comes in from the web, the server software figures out which site it’s for and sends out the requested file, which is usually the home page of the site (e.g., “index.html). The most common type of web server software for UNIX platforms is Apache. Others include Netscape Enterprise and Zeus.

Website-performance efficiency - Website-performance efficiency is one of the factors that influences the dropouts in the customer-centric measurement framework. The technical performance of your website reflects its efficiency which, in turn, is a key to retaining customers.

Website URL - A Website URL is the complete address to a website. For example, the complete URL to customfitonline.com is http://www.customfitonline.com/

Yellow Dog Linux - Yellow Dog Linux is variant of Red Hat Linux designed for Power PC CPU architectures, such as those sold by Apple and IBM.

Zeus - Zeus is a commercial web server software application that competes with Apache, Microsoft IIS, and iPlanet web server software systems.

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