A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z
A
A/B Test
A/B testing is a controlled experiment with two variants (A and B). In web design, the goal of A/B testing is to find changes to web pages that increase certain behaviors or conversions. These can include click-through rate for banner advertisements, form conversions, or sales.
Account
An account is required in Google Analytics. It contains 1 or more websites (or apps) also known as properties. Users can have multiple Analytics accounts, each of which may contain multiple properties. A user is required to have at least one account.
Addon
An Addon is a specific feature which can be purchased and extend the functionality of your MonsterInsights tracking. eCommerce Tracking is an example of an Addon.
Addons come with the Plus Package and the Pro Package of the paid tiers of MonsterInsights
Ads Tracking
MonsterInsights Ads Tracking Addon gives you a clear understanding of your Google AdSense data at a glance, so that you can optimize your ads for maximum revenue.
Ads tracking is available in the Plus Package of MonsterInsights.
Affiliate Link Tracking
Affiliate links are a form of advertising where the advertiser pays fee typically for a percentage of the sales and/or a fixed price per click. Affiliate link tracking tracks the clicks of the affiliate links by creating an event. This enables publishers to track and optimize the effectiveness of their affiliate marketing campaigns.
Affiliate Link Tracking is available as an Addon for MonsterInsights.
Analytics
Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance.
[Source: Wikipedia.]
Author Tracking
Author tracking allows you to see which authors are getting the best results by adding a Custom Dimension of Author in Google Analytics.
Available in the Custom Dimensions Addon, which comes as part of the Pro Tier of the MonsterInsights paid package.
B
Bounce Rate
A percentage of sessions that are no longer than 10 seconds, that only has 1 page view, or no conversion events. This metric is accessible in Google Analytics exploration reports.
See also: Engaged sessions and Engagement rate
C
Campaign
A campaign is any work in an organized and active way toward a particular marketing goal. By tracking each marketing effort in its own campaign, these efforts can be discretely measured and optimized.
Examples include email campaigns, ad campaigns, and social media campaigns. For tracking such campaigns, use the URL Builder to add campaign parameters to your links.
See also: Campaign Parameters and URL Builder.
Campaign Content
alias: ‘utm_content’
Campaign Content is one of the Campaign Parameters available in the URL Builder. Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.
Examples: logolink or textlink.
Campaign Medium
alias: ‘utm_medium’
Campaign Medium is one of the Campaign Parameters available in the URL Builder. Used to identify the marketing medium like email, cost-per-click, social, or banner.
Properly attribute your visits to the campaign medium by adding this parameter in the URL Builder to utm_medium to track the campaign medium in Google Analytics.
Example:
https://www.example.com/?utm_source=summer-mailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=summer-sale
Campaign Name
alias: ‘utm_campaign’
Campaign Name is one of the Campaign Parameters available in the URL Builder. Used for keyword analysis. Use utm_campaign to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign.
Example: utm_campaign=spring_sale.
Campaign Parameters
Campaign Parameters in Google Analytics include:
Source
Medium
Name
Content
Term
Campaign Parameters are available in the URL Builder. Adding these parameters to a URL allow you to capture reporting data about the referring campaign.
See Also: Campaigns.
Campaign Source
alias: ‘utm_source’
Campaign Source is one of the Campaign Parameters available in the URL Builder. Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or another source.
Example: utm_source=google.
Campaign source is the only required parameter in the URL Builder to be added to the URL.
Campaign Term
alias: ‘utm_term’
Campaign Source is one of the Campaign Parameters available in the URL Builder. Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad.
Example: utm_term=running+shoes.
Category Tracking
Category tracking allows you to see which sections of your sites are the most popular. Category tracking adds a Custom Dimension of ‘category’ in Google Analytics.
It comes in the Custom Dimensions Addon, which comes as part of the Pro Tier of the MonsterInsights paid package.
Client ID
alias: ‘CID’
The Client ID anonymously indicates a user, device, or browser instance. For a website, it’s typically stored as a cookie with a two-year expiration. For Android and iPhone apps it’s randomly generated for each instance of a particular application.
See also: User ID.
Cookie
alias: ‘Internet Cookie’, ‘Browser Cookie’, ‘Web Cookie’
A cookie is a tiny file sent from a website. It’s stored on the visitors’ computer by their browser while they are visiting the site. Users can clear or turn off cookies in their browser. However clearing cookies will typically sign a user out off all of their sites such as Facebook, Email, etc.
The Google Analytics uses Cookies to “remember” what a user has done on previous pages and interactions of the site. Clearing cookies will end any Google Analytics’ tracking sessions for that user.
See also: EU Cookie Law.
Custom dimensions
A Dimension is a qualitative attribute of your data. Dimensions are coupled with metrics to generate reports.
The MonsterInsights Custom Dimensions Addon allows you to create additional dimensions viewable in Google Analytics. MonsterInsights allows you to choose from several custom dimension types. They are:
See also: How to set up Custom Dimensions.
D
Data Stream
A data stream in Google Analytics is a container where all stats for a website and app (iOS or Android) are stored.
You can create multiple data streams for a property. Each data stream has a measurement ID (G-XXXXXXX).
Data streams can’t be edited after they’re created. Deleting a data stream can’t be reversed.
You can find data streams under the Google Analytics admin Property column.
Demographics
Enabling demographics allows you to find out information about the age, gender, and interests of your users.
See also: How to Collect User and Demographics Data in Google Analytics.
Dimensions
Dimensions are attributes of your data. For example, the dimension City indicates the city, for example, “Paris” or “New York,” from which a session originates. The dimension “Page” indicates the URL of a viewed page.
[Source: support.google.com.]
Dimensions and metrics are necessary to generate reports in Google Analytics.
Downloads Tracking
MonsterInsights allow you to accurately track your file downloads with Google Analytics.
Find out exactly how many times each file has been downloaded without touching a single line of code.
See also: File Download Tracking.
E
eCommerce tracking
Understanding your audience is crucial to the success of your eCommerce store. This will help you understand your customers and optimize your store for more sales. MonsterInsights eCommerce Addon helps you add Google Analytics eCommerce tracking to your WordPress WooCommerce, MemberPress, LifterLMS, and Easy Digital Downloads store.
See also: Ecommerce Tracking Addon.
Engagement
Engagement Tracking in MonsterInsights allows you to track, or ignore users who are logged in. By Default, MonsterInsights ignores user roles of Administrator and Editor.
Additionally, MonsterInsights allows you to track outbound clicks and download links. You’ll see where users are exiting your site, and what downloads they are interacting with.
MonsterInsights also tracks top posts and pages. eCommerce product purchases and forms tracking are additional metrics of engagement available with the Pro Paid Plans.
Engagement rate
A percentage of sessions that are 10 seconds or longer, that has at least 2 page views, or has a conversion event.
See also: Bounce rate.
Engaged sessions
Number of sessions that lasted 10 seconds or longer, or had 1 or more conversion events or 2 or more page views
See also: Session.
Enhanced eCommerce
You can use gtag.js to send impression data, product data, promotion data, and action data to Google Analytics.
This is possible after you’ve configured Google Analytics in gtag.js and you have enhanced eCommerce enabled in Google Analytics.
See also: developers.google.com.
Enhanced Link Attribution
If you have 2 or more links to the same destination from one page, Enhanced Link Attribution will show you which link is getting the most clicks.
You can see which button on your landing page is the most effective, or which call-to-action link from a blog post is generating the most leads.
Read more: Enhanced Link Attribution.
EU Cookie Law
Alias: ‘ePrivacy Directive’, ‘Cookie Law’
It deals with the regulation of a number of important issues such as confidentiality of information, treatment of traffic data, spam and cookies. This Directive has been amended by Directive 2009/136, which introduces several changes, especially in what concerns cookies, that are now subject to prior consent.
[Source: Wikipedia.org.]
EU GDPR
Alias: ‘European Union General Data Protection Regulation’
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and was designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy. The key articles of the GDPR, as well as information on its business impact, can be found throughout this site.
[Source: eugdpr.org.]
Event Parameters
Event parameters are the additional information about an event that helps provide more granular data when using dimensions and metrics.
Events
Measure an interaction or occurrence on your website, such as a page load, a link click or a purchase.
Event Value
Can be set to a number like 0, 1, 10, etc. Only integers are valid.
F
Facebook Instant Articles
Your Instant Articles pages will load up to 10 times faster than standard mobile pages. Readers are 70% less likely to abandon your content due to the faster load time. Facebook Instant Articles for MonsterInsights adds your Google Analytics tracking to Instant Articles.
The Facebook Instance Article technology competes with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.
Filters
Filters limit or change the data in a Google Analytics reporting view. For example, you can use filters to exclude traffic from particular IP addresses, include only data from specific subdomains or directories, or convert dynamic page URLs to readable text strings. [Source: support.google.com.]
Types of Reporting-view filters:
- Include and exclude filters
- Search-and-replace filters
- Advanced filters
- Exclude internal traffic
- Filter domain referrals
- Filter on geography
- Custom filter fields
- Social Network filters
Note filters are destructive: once data has been filtered from a view it can never be recovered. For this reason, we always recommend alternatives to Reporting-view filters.
See also: Segments.
Focus Keyword tracking
If you’re using the Yoast plugin for SEO, you can analyze the Focus Keywords of your posts and pages in Google Analytics. Comes available in the Custom Dimensions Addon in the Pro Tier of the Paid Package.
See also: How to set up Custom Dimensions.
Forms tracking
Enable tracking of your form views, submissions, and conversions rates.
G
Google AMP
The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an open-source initiative. AMP aims to improve the performance of web content and ads through a publishing technology known as AMP.
[Source: Wikipedia.]
AMP Includes 3 components:
- AMP HTML: HTML with some restrictions for reliable performance.
- AMP JS: library ensures the fast rendering of AMP HTML pages.
- AMP Cache: The Google AMP Cache can be used to serve cached AMP HTML pages.
[Source: ampproject.org.]
Google AMP is a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a freemium analytics service that tracks and reports website and app traffic.
Google Analytics dashboard
Dashboards are a collection of widgets that give you an overview of the reports and metrics you care about most. Dashboards let you track many metrics at once. Check the health of your accounts and see correlations between different reports. Dashboards are easy to create, customize and share.
[Source: support.google.com.]
H
Hit
A hit is and an interaction that results in data being sent to Analytics. Common hit types include page tracking hits, event tracking hits, and eCommerce hits. Each time the tracking code is triggered by a user’s behavior (for example, when a user loads a page on a website or a screen in a mobile app), Analytics records that activity.
[Source: support.google.com.]
I
IP address filter
Filter out visitors including people on your corporate network.
MonsterInsights minimizes the need for this by not tracking logged in users. Additionally, we and strongly recommend against filters.
L
Logged in tracking
The Logged in custom dimension keeps track of whether your visitors are logged in to your site or not. However, it doesn’t track individual users.
In Google Analytics, a custom dimension allows you to create a custom report. You can choose ‘Logged in’ as your primary dimension and customize the report per your needs.
See also: User-ID tracking vs Logged-in Custom Dimension.
M
Measurement ID
The measurement ID is the tracking ID number for property data streams in Google Analytics. It’s also referred to as the “G-” ID because it follows the format G-XXXXXXX where the Xs can be letters or numbers.
You can find a measurement ID by viewing a data stream under the admin Property column.
[Source: Google Analytics]
Metrics
Metrics are quantitative measurements. The metric Sessions is the total number of sessions. The metric Pages/Session is the average number of pages viewed per session.
Metrics, along with Dimensions are the building-blocks of Reports in Google Analytics.
Monetization (Ecommerce)
Monetization is the name for the Ecommerce reports.
Under Monetization, you can see purchase stats from your site or app. Monetization is where you can analyze revenue, product views, ad conversions, add-to-carts activity, and more.
O
Outbound Link Tracking
Outbound link tracking allows you to see where your users go to when they leave your site. Outbound link tracking is measured using events tracking in Google Analytics. It is one of the measures of engagement that MonsterInsights makes it exceptionally easy to set up.
P
Page Views
A pageview or impression is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of a site. In Google Analytics, multiple pageviews and js events are organized into user sessions to better make sense of user behavior.
Performance
For high-performance sites, our Performance Addon allows you to adjust site speed and sample rate for Google Analytics.
When you are running a high traffic site, you may hit the Google Analytics processing limit. To stay within that limit the MonsterInsights Performance Addon gives you the ability to make sample rate and site speed sample rate adjustments.
If you only sample 50% of site visitors, you will only see 50% of visitors in your Google Analytics (and you may see a 50% drop in visits). For this reason, adjusting the sample rate is only recommended for sites in danger of hitting the processing limit.
See also: The Performance Addon.
Permissions
Permissions in MonsterInsights gives you control over which user roles have permission to view reports, edit settings, and more.
See also: How to allow user roles to access the MonsterInsights Reports and Settings.
Popular post Tracking
Popular Post tracking allows you to see which posts are the most popular in MonsterInsights.
See also: Popular Post Tracking.
Post Type Tracking
If you have several custom post types in your WordPress site, you can track the performance of each post type. Post Type Tracking adds a custom dimension to many reports in GA. It is available in the Custom Dimension Addon. The Custom Dimensions Addon comes as part of the Pro Tier of the MonsterInsights paid package.
Primary Dimension
The Primary dimensions are listed at the top of the data table in an Analytics report.
See also: dimensions.
Property
A property is a website or web application in Google Analytics. Properties are required to be contained in an account.
Published At Dimension Tracking
Published At tracking allows you to see what publishing times are getting the best results. Enabling Published At tracking adds a custom dimension of date and time the page or post was published in Google Analytics.
Available in the Custom Dimensions Addon, which comes as part of the Pro Tier of the MonsterInsights paid package.
R
Referral Tracking
Find out what URL each visitor is coming from, so you can focus your efforts on what works.
Reports
Every report in Analytics is made up of dimensions and metrics.
Dimensions are attributes of your data. Metrics are quantitative measurements. Every report has a primary dimension. In most Analytics reports, you can change the dimension and add a secondary dimension.
See also: Dimensions and Metrics.
S
Scope
Scope determines which hits will be associated with a particular custom-dimension value. There are four levels of scope: product, hit, session, and user:
- Product – value is applied to the product for which it has been set (Enhanced eCommerce only).
- Hit – value is applied to the single hit for which it has been set.
- Session – value is applied to all hits in a single session.
- User – value is applied to all hits in current and future sessions until value changes or custom dimension is made inactive.
[Source: support.google.com.]
Secondary Dimension
In many reports, a secondary dimension can be added to the already-visible Primary Dimension and Metrics (reports are always comprised of a Primary Dimension and Metrics).
However, not every dimension can be coupled to every other secondary dimension. Each dimension and metric has a scope: user-level, session-level, or hit-level. Typically, you can only combine dimensions and metrics that share the same scope. For example, Sessions is a session-based metric so it can only be used with session-level dimensions like Source or City. It would be nonsensical to combine Sessions with a hit-level dimension like Page.
[Source: support.google.com.]
See also: Dimensions.
Segments
A segment is a subset of your Analytics data. For example, of your entire set of users, one segment might be users from a particular country or city. Another segment might be users who purchase a particular line of products or who visit a specific part of your site.
[Source: support.google.com.]
SEO Score tracking
Using the Yoast SEO? Our Custom Dimensions Addon allows you to create a Custom Dimension for SEO Score as measured by Yoast SEO.
Custom Dimensions comes as part of the Pro Tier of the MonsterInsights paid package.
Session
A session is a set of visitor interactions with a website that takes place within a period of time. A session can contain many pageviews, events, form submissions, and eCommerce transactions.
One user can open multiple sessions. These sessions can occur on a single day, or over many days, weeks, or months. When a session ends, then a new session can be triggered by further activity on a site by the same user. There are two ways a session ends:
- Time-based expiration: either after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight.
- Campaign change: If a user arrives via one campaign, leaves, and then returns through a different campaign.
See also: Engaged sessions.
Short URL
A unique short URL redirects visitors to a long URL.
Effective for social media campaigns and more.
See Also: URL Shortener and URL.
T
Tags Tracking
Tags tracking in MonsterInsights creates a custom dimension of tag in Google analytics.
Available in the Custom Dimensions Addon, which comes as part of the Pro Tier of the MonsterInsights paid package.
See also: How to Track Tags and Categories in Google Analytics and Category Tracking.
U
URL
Universal resource locator: the web address for a webpage. The URL is entered in the address bar of the web browser.
URL Builder
The URL Builder is used to enhance tracking and statistics with GA. The URL builder helps you add parameters to your URLs you use in custom web-based or email ad campaigns. (A custom campaign is any ad campaign not using the AdWords auto-tagging feature.) When users click one of the custom links, the unique parameters are sent to your Analytics account. This is so you can identify the URLs that are the most effective in attracting users to your content.
You can find it under Insights » Tools » URL Builder.
The URL Builder comes with all of our paid packages.
URL Shortener
URL Shorteners compress long URLs that include additional data. This data may include Google Analytics Campaign parameters and shortens the URL for a better user experience (UX).
The MonsterInsights’ URL shortener uses goo.gl. Others include bitly.com.
Redirectors do not filter bots and may have higher stats for that and other reasons when compared to your Google Analytics stats.
Usage tracking
Enabling usage tracking allows developers like MonsterInsights access to some anonymized usage data. This data allows us to better serve our customers in product testing and development. This data includes what percentage of our users are on outdated versions of WordPress and Google Analytics. This helps us make more informed decisions as we develop MonsterInsights.
User ID
Alias: ‘uid’
This is intended to be a known identifier for a user provided by the site owner/tracking library user. It must not itself be PII (personally identifiable information). The value should never be persisted in GA cookies or other Analytics provided storage.
[Source: developers.google.com.]
See also: Cookie, User ID Tracking, and Client ID.
User ID tracking
You can track each logged-in user’s activity by setting User ID as a custom dimension. This is ideal for eCommerce and membership sites.
This replaces Google Analytics’ CID with WordPress’s User ID for logged in users.
utm_campaign
See: Campaign Name.
utm_content
See: Campaign Content.
utm_source
See: Campaign Source.
utm_term
See: Campaign Term.
V
View
A reporting view is the level in an Analytics account where you can access reports and analysis tools. Analytics automatically creates one unfiltered view for every property in your account. Additionally, you can add more views to a single property.
You can use filters to customize views and see only a subset of data in your reports. You might, for example, have one view to filter out all internal traffic, and another to include only activity from a specific website directory or subdomain.
[Source: support.google.com.]
However, we always recommend against the use of filters. We advocate for other methods such as segmentation. This is because the destructive nature of filters cause more problems than they solve for the majority of users.