Click-through: The act of a user clicking a link to another website from your site or email campaign. For example, when a user clicks an image map on your site to go to your business partner’s website. Click-through rates are used to measure the effectiveness of website elements such as online advertisements.

Conversion: The relationship between the number of web site visitors and a desired action of those visitors. In an ecommerce setting, conversion is defined as the ratio of the total number of visits to the total number of sales. For example, if a site received 100 visits that resulted in 3 sales, the conversion rate would be 3%.

Organic Search: The method of search engines returning results based upon a user’s search parameter (key word or key phrase). Organic search results are based upon a number of criteria, defined differently by the various search engines. Keyword search: A search for documents containing one or more words specified by a user in a search engine text box.

Pageview: A “page” is any document provided by the server, including HTML pages, script pages (.asp, .cgi, etc.), and plain-text documents. Image, sound and video files are not considered pages. A “pageview” is registered in your web analytics each time an actual document is served.

Paid Search: An advertising platform, typically driven from Search Engines and/or directories. The model typically follows a CPC (cost per click) model, only charging a fee for visitors that reach your website. Paid Search ads appear two ways: search placement and content placement. Ads within search placement appear when searchers search for a particular term that you have elected to purchase. Ads appear within the content placement model when relevant content is served from the search engine partner (news sites, industry sites, etc.)

Traffic: The number of visitors to a Web page or Website. Refers to the number of visitors, hits, page accesses, etc., over a given time period. As a general term, it describes data traveling around the Internet.

Unique Visitor: A real visitor to a Website (versus a visit by a search engine robot). Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a Web site. If someone visits twenty pages within your site, the server will count only one unique visitor and twenty page views.

Visitor: This is defined as more than one hit from the same IP address as long as there is no idle time of more than 30 minutes between those hits. According to most analytics programs, whenever the program detects a gap of more than 30 minutes between any two hits from the same IP address, it is assumed that it is a new visitor.