Google's flagship advertising product and main source of revenue ($16.4 billion in 2007). AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC)
advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.

Analytics

In reference to search engine optimization, analytics is the study of traffic business data using statistical analysis in order to discover and understand historical patterns, with an eye to predicting and improving business performance in the future.

Authentication

The act of using a username and password to establish or confirm someone as authentic, verifying that claims made by or about the subject are true.

Authority Site

A term used to represent a certain status, granted by a special Google team, of a particular site. Privileges include higher search ranking on Google and greater strength in outward links. Usually .EDU and .GOV sites, by default, receive this special status.

Average Time Spent on Site

Average session length per visit during a particular time period.

Average Page Views per Visitor

An average of the number of pages each visitor visits.

Bandwidth

A measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bit/s or multiples of it (kbit/s, Mbit/s etc).

Bitmap

A type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits.

Blog

Usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

BMP

See BitMap above.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

Brand

A brand consists of a collection of symbols, domain names, experiences and associations connected with a product, a service, a person or any other artifact or entity.

Brand Type-In Traffic

Traffic received by visitors trying to guess the url location of a brands website by typing the brand url into the browser window.

Broken Link

A link that does not go to the correct page. Usually it is redirected to an error page.

Browser

A browser is often the shortened version of the word Web browser. A browser is a software application which allows a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music, games and other information typically located on a Web page at a Web site on the World Wide Web or a local area network. An example is Windows Explorer, Firefox or Google Chrome.

Browser Type-In Traffic

Referring to the collection of both Guess Type-In Traffic and Brand Type-In Traffic.

Business-to-business (B2B)

A term commonly used to describe commerce transactions between businesses, as opposed to those between businesses and other groups, such as business-to-consumers (B2C) or business-to-government (B2G). More specifically, B2B is often used to describe an activity, such as B2B marketing, or B2B sales, that occurs between one businesses and another.

Business-to-consumer (B2C)

Describes activities of businesses serving end consumers with products and/or services.

Business-to-government (B2G)

A derivative of B2B marketing and often referred to as a market definition of "public sector marketing" which encompasses
marketing products and services to government agencies through integrated marketing communications techniques such as strategic public relations, branding, advertising, and web-based communications.

Bytes

A basic unit of measurement of information storage in computer science. In many computer architectures it is a unit of memory addressing. There is no standard but a byte most often consists of eight bits. A kilobyte = 1,024 bytes, megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes and a gigabyte = 1,073,741,842 bytes.

Cache

A temporary storage area on a computer where frequently accessed data (websites) can be stored for rapid access. Once the data is stored in the cache, future use can be made by accessing the cached copy rather than re-fetching or recomputing the original data, so that the average access time is shorter.

Cash Parking

Used primarily by domain name registrars and internet advertising publishers to monetize type-in traffic visiting a parked or "under-developed" domain name. The domain name will usually resolve to a web page containing advertising listings and links. These links will be targeted to the predicted interests of the visitor and may change dynamically based on the results that visitors click on. Usually the domain holder is paid based on how many links have been visited (e.g. pay per click) and on how beneficial those visits have been. The keywords for any given domain name provide clues as to the intent of the visitor before arriving.

Click Path

The path that user takes, clicking through a particular site, from the first page he visits to the last page he ends with.

Click-through rate

A way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if a banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and one person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1 percent.

Code

See source code.

Color Palettes

A "color lookup table," "lookup table," "index map," "color table" or "color map," it is a commonly used method for saving file space when creating 8-bit color images. Instead of each pixel containing its own red, green and blue values, which would require 24 bits, each pixel holds an 8-bit value, which is an index number into the color palette. The color palette contains 256 predefined RGB values from 0 to 255.

Conversion rate

The key metric ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.

Cookie

Parcels of text sent by a server to a Web client (usually a browser) and then sent back unchanged by the client each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking (state maintenance), and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts. Also referred as a 'HTTP cookies', Web cookie, tracking cookie.

CTR

See click-through rate.

Deployment

To set/transition a website in a position where it is ready for use.

Digital Bandwidth

A measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bit/s or multiples of it (kbit/s, Mbit/s etc).

Direct Marketing

A sub-discipline and type of marketing. There are two main definitional characteristics which distinguish it from other types of
marketing. The first is that it attempts to send its messages directly to consumers, without the use of intervening media. This involves commercial communication (direct mail, e-mail, telemarketing) with consumers or businesses, usually unsolicited. The second characteristic is that it is focused on driving purchases that can be attributed to a specific "call-to-action." This aspect of direct marketing involves an emphasis on trackable, measurable positive (but not negative) responses from consumers (known simply as "response" in the industry) regardless of medium.

Direct Navigation

Same as Direct Type-In Traffic.

Direct Type-In Traffic

This involves an internet user navigating to a website directly through the website address bar, bypassing any online search engines and navigating directly to the domain.

Directory

An entity in a file system, which contains a group of files and/or other directories. A typical file system may contain thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of directories. Files are kept organized by storing related files in the same directory.

DNS

See domain name system.

DNS Lookup

See reverse DNS lookup.

Domain

See domain name.

Domain Appraisal

An estimate about the potential sales price of a particular Internet domain name. Domain names appraisal is highly speculative. It is an estimate and an opinion, and can considerably vary depending upon the considered elements of the name and its extension. Traffic to and revenue from a web is not relevant to a domain, but to the web content. It is a common mistake to take web traffic and revenue into calculation of a domain.

Domain Name

Symbolic representations (recognizable names), to mostly numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet, in effect changing the IP address. This translation from domain names to IP addresses (and vice versa) is accomplished with the global facilities of Domain Name System (DNS).

Domain Name System

A hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource participating in the Internet. It associates various information with domain names assigned to such participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices world-wide. An often used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the "phone book" for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, www.example.com translates to 208.77.188.166.

Domain Parking

Refers to the registration of an internet domain name without that domain being associated with any services such as e-mail or a website. This may have been done with a view to reserving the domain name for future development, and to protect against the possibility of cyber squatting. Since the domain name registrar will have set name servers for the domain, the registrar or reseller potentially has use of the domain rather than the final registrant.

Download

To receive data to a local system from a remote system, such as a web server, FTP server, mail server, or other similar systems.

Dynamic URL

A dynamic URL is the address - or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) - of a Web page with content that depends on variable parameters that are provided to the server that delivers it. The parameters may be already present in the URL itself or they may be the result of user input. A dynamic URL can often be recognized by the presence of certain characters or character strings that appear in the Address bar of your browser). The following are representative: & $ + = ? % cgi

E-commerce

Consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.

Encryption

The process of transforming information (referred to as plaintext) using an algorithm (called cipher) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key.

End User

A person who uses a product after it has been developed and marketed.

Entry Pages

A count of the number of times each page was the first page viewed on all visitors click path within a site.

Error Code

See Status Code.

Error page

Pages that visitors attempted to view, but are directed to a generic error message instead.

Exit Pages

A count of the number of times each page was the last page viewed on all visitors click path within a site.

File Format

A particular way to encode information for storage in a computer file.

File Type

See File Format.

File Transfer Protocol

A basic method for copying a file from one computer to another through the Internet.

Firewall

An integrated collection of security measures designed to prevent unauthorized electronic access to a networked computer system. It is also a device or set of devices configured to permit, deny, encrypt, decrypt, or proxy all computer traffic between different security domains based upon a set of rules and other criteria.

Two Way Encryption

Reversibility in encrypting a body of text.

Upload

To send data from a local system to a remote system, FTP server, website, etc., with the intent that the remote system should save a copy of whatever is
being transferred.

URL

Abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.

URL Traffic Leakage

A user accidentally types the URL into the search box, of a search engine, rather then the browser URL bar.

Unique Visitor Session

A 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

When tracking the amount of traffic on a Web site, it refers to a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time. Software that tracks and counts Web site traffic can distinguish between visitors who only visit the site once and unique visitors who return to the site. Different from a site's hits or page views -- which are measured by the number of files that are requested from a site -- unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses, which are like online fingerprints, and unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site.

Usability Inspection

To evaluate a user interface without involving users.

Usability Testing

A technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system.

User

An individual who uses a computer.

User Agent

A term used to mean any program used for accessing a Web site. This includes browsers, robots, spiders and any other program that was used to retrieve information from the site.

Username

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

Viral marketing

A type of marketing technique that relies on and encourages people to pass along a marketing message by word-of-mouth (or word-of-e-mail) marketing. Viral marketing online uses blog and social networks to produce positive word-of-mouth brand awareness.

Visibility time

The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is viewed.

Visit

A page request or a series of page requests by a visitor to a 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 series of requests from the same uniquely identified client with a set timeout, often 30 minutes. A visit is expected to contain multiple page views.

W3

See W3C Standards below.

W3C Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web.

Web

See World Wide Web below.

Web Cross Marketing
 

Web Server

A computer that delivers (serves up) Web pages. Every Web server has an IP address and possibly a domain name. For example, if you enter the URL http://www.webtrafficconsultants.com/index.htm in your browser, this sends a request to the server whose domain name is webtrafficconsultants.com. The server then fetches the page named index.htm and sends it to your browser.
Any computer can be turned into a Web server by installing server software and connecting the machine to the Internet. There are many Web server software applications, including public domain software from NCSA and Apache, and commercial packages from Microsoft, Netscape and others.

Website Deployment

To set/transition a website in a position where it is ready for use.

WhoIs Information

(pronounced "who is"; not an acronym) A query/response protocol which is widely used for querying an official database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address, or an autonomous system number on the Internet.

Word document

A Microsoft's flagship word processing software.

World Wide Web

A system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots. Not all Internet servers are part of the World Wide Web.