Tracking & analytics, explained without jargon

A/B testing is the practice of running two versions of a page, element, or…

Active Users in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the count of distinct users who…

The GA4 add to cart event (add_to_cart) fires the moment a shopper places a…

"Affiliate" lives in two worlds at once. In GA4 ecommerce it is a structured…

AOV (Average Order Value) is one of the most actionable metrics in any e-commerce…

An app event is a single user action recorded inside a mobile app and…

Attribution is how analytics tools assign credit for a conversion across the marketing touchpoints…

An attribution model is the specific rule or algorithm that decides how conversion credit…

BigQuery is Google Cloud's serverless data warehouse, and for most analytics teams it earns…

The GA4 bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged —…

A campaign in marketing analytics is a coordinated set of activities (paid ads, emails,…

Cart abandonment is the moment a shopper adds a product to their online cart,…

The GA4 client_id is the anonymous, browser-scoped identifier that lets Google Analytics 4 stitch…

A cohort is a group of users who share a defining characteristic anchored to…

Cohort analysis groups users by a shared starting characteristic — usually their first session,…

A GTM container is the bundle that holds every tag, trigger, and variable for…

A conversion in Google Analytics is a user action you've defined as valuable —…

The conversion rate is the percentage of visits, sessions, or users that complete a…

A cookie is a small text record (a name, a value, and a few…

A cookie banner (also called a Consent Management Platform, or CMP) is the on-site…

Core Web Vitals are Google's three real-user performance metrics that quantify how a page…

Correlation measures how two variables move together. In analytics, it's the math behind every…

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) — also called Cost per Action — is the average…

Cost per Click (CPC) is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user…

CPL (Cost per Lead) is the average marketing cost you pay to acquire one…

CPM (Cost per Mille) — Latin for "cost per thousand" — is the price…

Cross-device tracking is the practice of recognizing the same person as they switch between…

Cross-domain tracking is the practice of stitching one user's journey together when they navigate…

Cross-platform tracking measures the same user across the web browser, an iOS app, and…

Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who click after seeing a link,…

GA4 custom events are user-defined event hits that you create when none of Google's…

The data layer is the contract between your website and your tracking. It's a…

A GA4 data stream is the collection endpoint that pipes data from one of…

DebugView is the Google Analytics 4 tool that shows events streaming from your device…

The demographics dimensions in GA4 describe who your visitors are at an aggregate level…

The GA4 device category is the dimension that classifies every session into one of…

Direct traffic in GA4 is the bucket Google Analytics 4 uses when it cannot…

In Google Analytics 4, an engaged session is one that lasted over 10 seconds,…

The GA4 engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged — visits…

Engagement time in GA4 is the total number of seconds a user spent with…

Enhanced conversions is a Google Ads feature that supplements ordinary conversion tracking with hashed…

Enhanced measurement is GA4's set of seven auto-collected events that fire on every web…

A GA4 event is the atomic unit of measurement in Google Analytics 4 —…

Event parameters are the name–value pairs attached to every GA4 event that describe what…

First-touch attribution (also called first-click attribution) gives 100% of conversion credit to the first…

The first_visit event in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the automatic event that fires…

A first-party cookie is a small piece of data set by the domain shown…

A GCLID (Google Click Identifier) is a URL parameter that Google Ads appends to…

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the European Union law that since 25…

A Goal in web analytics is a user action defined as success — a…

Looker Studio is Google's free, web-based dashboarding and reporting tool — and it is…

Google Signals is session data from websites and apps that Google associates with users…

Last-touch attribution — also called last-click attribution — assigns 100% of the conversion credit…

A lookback window is the maximum stretch of time before a conversion during which…

LTV (Lifetime Value), also called Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), is the total revenue a…

A macro conversion is the completion of a primary business goal — a purchase,…

A Measurement ID is the identifier that tells the Google tag which GA4 destination…

The Measurement Protocol is GA4's server-side ingestion API. It lets your backend, mobile app,…

Medium in marketing analytics is the dimension that describes how a visitor arrived —…

A micro conversion is a small, measurable user action that signals progress toward a…

Omnichannel analytics unifies every customer interaction — web, mobile app, email, paid ads, social,…

Organic search in GA4 is the channel assigned to visits that arrive from unpaid…

Pages per session is a Universal Analytics metric that divided total pageviews by total…

A pageview in GA4 is a single load of a page recorded as a…

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence platform for building reports and dashboards from many…

A GA4 property is the container in Google Analytics that holds the data, reports…

The GA4 purchase event is the most important e-commerce event in Google Analytics 4.…

Real-time data in analytics is the live event stream that surfaces user activity within…

Referral traffic in GA4 is any visit that arrives by clicking a link on…

The referrer is the URL of the page a user was on immediately before…

Return on Investment (ROI) is the bottom-line profitability metric in marketing — the percentage…

A screen_view in GA4 is the mobile-app equivalent of a web pageview: a single…

A session in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a time-bounded container of user activity…

session_start is the automatically collected event GA4 fires the moment a new session begins…

Source is the GA4 dimension that identifies who sent the click: the publisher, search…

A tag management system (TMS) is a single piece of JavaScript that loads, governs,…

A GTM trigger is the rule that tells Google Tag Manager when a tag…

User flow is the sequence of pages and events a visitor moves through during…

User properties are attributes you attach to a visitor in GA4 — subscription plan,…

User-ID is the identifier you assign to a signed-in visitor and pass into GA4,…

UTM parameters are short tags appended to a URL — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content,…

A GTM workspace is an isolated draft layer of your container in Google Tag…