I’ve been reading Web Analytics An Hour a Day
by Avinash Kaushik. Having been away from web
analytics for several years I was anxious to learn
about the new tools available and the myriad of metrics I can analyze and report on. The book is very readable and I definitely recommend it (reviewers at Amazon give it a five star rating). Also, all the proceeds go to charity.

However, at about page 132 I started wishing
for a glossary, or an English/Web Analytics
Dictionary as I considered writing a few definitions on my hand. My deep dive into web data terminology reminded me of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, wherein he moves to France and misguidedly attempts to learn to speak French with silly consequences. In the same vein, see Stupid Boy, about pastry chef David Lebovitz's misadventures avec francais; but I digress.

I am not alone. Standardizing terms in web analytics is apparently a recognized problem, “creating of a
vendor-neutral glossary of web analytics
technology terms” is on the agenda of the
Web Analytics Association. And web
measurement standards are covered by
the IFABC Standards Group and the
JICWEBS/Global Standards. However, in reality
it looks like standardized terminology is still
experiencing some growing pains, and redundancy peppered with inconsistency rules. Consider these different definitions of the relatively common term Page View:

• Page View: Each rendering of the web
  page by the server is counted as a page
  view. link
• Page View: This is a common term used
  by web analytics tools; the industry-
  standard metric is Page Impression. link
• Page View: is generally defined as a
  request to load a single page of a website.
  On the web, a page request would result
  from a web surfer clicking on a link on
  another page that points to the page in
  question. See also hit. link
• Page View - The opportunity for a page to appear in a browser window as a direct result of a visitor's interaction with a website. The term "page" is used to represent the visitor's view of a website through the browser window. A page request does not guarantee that a visitor actually viewed the requested page. It only measures the opportunity for that page to have been delivered to the visitor. A page request will be valid even if the resource or information requested does not load to completion or otherwise become fully available to the requesting visitor. Pages may contain text, images, media objects or other online elements. However, only one page is counted per request. A request that is followed by an interstitial page (a page that appears in a separate browser window while a web page is loading), will only count as one page request. Cached pages (pages held in processor memory) are not counted in page-hit calculations, so as to have a system of measurement that replicates web log file data. link

So the struggle continues. Itching for the equivalent of a laminated cheat sheet to support my efforts, I created a table of duplicate terms and a list of online web analytic glossaries. Hopefully we can all speak analytics pretty one day - and actually understand each other. Bon chance!

Duplicate terms

Online Web Analytic Glossaries
http://www.webtrendslive.com/Resources
/WebAnalyticsGlossary.aspx

http://www.outsource2india.com/web
analytics/glossary.asp

http://www.stratigent.com/web-analytics
-glossary/default.html

http://www.nabler.com/articles/
web-analytics-glossary.asp

http://netvantagemarketing.com/?page_id=69

http://www.modernwebanalytics.com/glossary

http://www.jicwebs.org/jicwebs_results.php

http://www.onstats.com/2007/06/web-analytics
-glossary.html

http://www.sclanalytics.com/resources/glossary

http://www.webtraffiq.com/documents/glossary.php