Glossary of Web Terms

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the time it takes for a user to exit a page after it has loaded on their screen. The bounce rate is often represented in percentage value.

A high bounce rate could indicate irrelevant or poor quality content, or it could also indicate the user was able to quickly find the answer to their request on the loaded page.

 

Browser

Software for retrieving, presenting, and interacting with information resources on the world wide web. They are found on every connected device, most commonly on PCs, tablets and laptops. The leading internet browsers are: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Microsoft Edge.

Cache

Version of your web page that are stored locally on your browser for quick access in the future.

Click Through Rate – CTR

CTR is the percentage value of how many users have clicked through to your website or landing page.

CMS

CMS (Content Management System) provide two core services:

  • A base platform for building websites and web apps.
  • The ability for non-technical users to self-manage (add/update/delete) a variety of content on their websites.

Content

Content is what populates a website, most typically text (words), graphics (photos and logos), audio, video, etc.

Content Types

A pre-defined collection of data types (fields) which relate to each other. Common content types include: basic pages, articles, news, and events. Fields for a ‘news’ content type would typically be, at a minimum: title, description, and date. Existing content types can be customised to more exact requirements, new/custom content types can be created from scratch.

Crawling

Crawl is a word associated with the search engine bots (e.g. Google, Bing) scanning over your site to index all the pages to get the latest copy of the information.

Websites are continually re-crawled over time to avoid old pages being indexed.

 

 

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic means someone has typed in your web address directly into the address bar to access your site.

Domain name

An easy-to-remember name for your website, email addresses, and other online services. Itomic’s primary domain name is itomic.com.au.

Hosting

Think of this as storage of your web page (like a storage unit you can hire)

IA

Information Architecture (or simply put, sitemap)

Impressions

An impression is when your site is displayed in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) after a search query.
The impression doesn’t guarantee a click through or goal conversion.

Landing Page

The final webpage URL destination of the user. e.g. itomic.com.au/contact

 

New User

A new user is the count of someone that has never accessed the page before.

Organic Search

Organic search refers to your non-paid listing results. They appear underneath the Google paid ads.
The position of the results are achieved by a variety of different Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts.

Page Views

Page view is the count of when a particular page is loaded or reloaded.

Referral

Referral is traffic coming to your site external to Google.
An example of this is a hyperlink to your site from a 3rd party source. (i.e. The user didn’t need to visit Google and click on a link to arrive at your site).

 

Responsive

A term described for when a website is able to adjust itself to different screen sizes across all platforms. On the smaller devices it will often lend itself to touch friendly elements such as the hamburger menu.

Returning User

A returning user is the count of someone the tracking code already recognises as a previous visitor.

SEM

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – refers to the paid online advertising activities such as Google adwords, Retargeting, Remarketing, Display Ads etc.

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) refers to on-page and off-page activity involved in order for webpages to be found easily by Search Engines (e.g. Google, Bing etc).

SERP

SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This is the page(s) where all of the search outcome is listed on the page.

Session

A session is a series of actions that a user completes when visiting your website.
e.g. A session can consist of multiple page views and and interactions with calls to actions etc.

Session Duration

The total time the user took to complete a single session.

SSL

Short for Secure Sockets Layer, provides encryption between web server and browser. The SSL ensures all private data (such as passwords and credit card information) remain private. In order to create a SSL connection, an SSL certificate is required.

Theming

Theming, or re-theming, changes the design/look of your website, often including its layout. Most CMS like WordPress or Drupal come preinstalled with a default theme, which then needs to be changed to suit the branding and IA of your own organisation. Theming is the action of taking an approved graphic design and applying it to your site.

UAT

User Acceptance Testing (UAT). A copy of your website, also called a staging version, that exists for the purpose of applying, testing, and approving updates, prior to them being copied to the live/production version of the site.

Unique Pageview

A unique pageview collates all the pageviews completed by a user during the single session.

e.g. Where a normal pageview will count 5 if a page is reloaded 5 times, the unique pageview will only count 1 even if the page is reloaded 5 times in the same session.

URL

(URL) Uniform Resource Locators is the unique address for your website. e.g. Itomic’s URL would be www.itomic.com.au

UX/UI

User Experience / User Interface. The names are quite self explanatory but UI typically refers to the graphical elements of the page whereas the UX references the functionality.

Version Control

A method by which code changes to your site can be reliably made by developers, often involving copying approved changes from your UAT site to your live/production site. A log of all changes is automatically recorded, allowing quick roll-back to an earlier version if there is a problem with latest version. One of the most common systems that facilitate version control is called ‘git’.