We've put together a handy glossary of the most common analytics terms you'll find in our reports.
Glossary
A
- Abandoned Cart: An abandoned cart is a cart that has items in it, but was not purchased. This happens when a visitor comes to your store, adds an item to cart, and then leaves without purchasing.
- Note: A cart is considered abandoned 1 hour after the visitor leaves the site without purchasing the items placed in his or her cart.
- Abandoned Revenue: The abandoned revenue is the sum dollar value of the item prices of all the abandoned carts in a given time period. Your in-store analytics are looking at visit_id for this metric on the cart events we receive. As an example, a shopper visits a store in the morning and adds an item to their cart, then logs off for several hours. They visit again in the evening and add a different item to their cart, but ultimately do not buy anything. This would all show as abandoned revenue.
- Abandon Rate: The abandon rate is the percentage of total carts that are abandoned carts. It is derived by dividing the abandoned carts by the total carts.
- Average Cart Value: Cart value is based on items that were added and removed during the cart’s visit. Any persistent cart items added during previous visits would not be counted.
- Average Order Value (AOV): The average order value is the average value of a store's orders over a given period of time. In other words, this is the average amount each customer has paid per order. It is derived by dividing revenue by orders.
- Average Price: The sum of the line item prices of the product divided by the total quantity sold.
- The calculation takes the quantity of the product sold at each price into account. For example, if an order includes a quantity of three of a certain product, the price at which that product was sold will be counted 3 times (Order Quantity*Price/Total Quantity = 3 * Price/3).
- If an item is included in two orders, one with three of the product at $5 each, and one with two of the product sold at a discount for $2 each, the calculation for average price will be ((3*5)+(2*2))/5.
B
- Bounce: A visitor bounces if they do not view more than one page on your website in a given 30 minute session. If more page views come in within 30 minutes, the number would be reverted, meaning your analytics will re-calculate.
C
- Cart: A cart is where a visitor stores the items from a merchant's website that he or she is considering purchasing. A cart is considered abandoned 1 hour after the visitor leaves the site without purchasing the items placed in his or her cart.
- Cohort: A group of subjects who have shared a particular event together during a particular time span.
- Conversion: A conversion is when a visitor creates and pays for an order.
- Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that are customers on your website. In other words, it is the percentage of visits that result in an order: total orders / total visits.
- Customer: A customer is any visitor who makes an order. A visitor who makes multiple orders is still only one customer.
D
- Dashboard: The dashboard is the home screen of your BigCommerce store. This is where you can see your Orders, Products, Categories, and Customers at a glance. Your dashboard can show data for one website at a time.
E
- Ecommerce Analytics: BigCommerce's built-in analytics reports.
- Ecommerce Insights: BigCommerce's premium insight reports that automatically analyze your store’s data and deliver valuable advice to grow your business. Ecommerce Insights has helped merchants increase revenue by up to 25% within the first three months of using it. You may learn more about Ecommerce Insights by going to Analytics › Insights in your BigCommerce control panel.
I
- In-Store Search: The search function available on the front-end of your BigCommerce website that enables your shoppers to enter keywords to locate specific items within your online store.
N
- Number of Carts: This may refer to several metrics found in the Carts report (Analytics › Carts) or how often abandoned cart emails should be sent (Settings › General › Miscellaneous tab › Abandoned Cart Emails setting).
O
- Order: An order is a purchased cart. Whenever a visitor purchases an item(s), it is considered an order. Orders returned or cancelled after they have been processed are not included in this statistic.
P
- Path Analysis: The practice of reviewing website behavior relating to browsing tendencies in an effort to better understand the effectiveness of copy, content, and information architecture.
- Percentage of Orders Discounted: The percentage of all orders that were discounted at the order level.
- Price Range: The lowest sale price of a purchased item (including discounts), and the highest sale price of a purchased item.
- Product Ranking: Products ranked according to revenue over a given time period.
- Product Revenue: Sum sale price of a given product, minus discounts over a given period of time.
- Purchase Funnel: The purchase funnel can be found on the Store Overview. It displays the number of visitors over a given period of time who:
- visited more than one page,
- looked at a product,
- put an item in a cart,
- and completed a sale.
- The purchase funnel is used best to understand which parts of the sales process visitors drop.
Q
- Quantity: The quantity of the product sold. If a customer purchased two black hats and one white hat, there would be a quantity of two black hats, and a quantity of one white hat.
R
- Referrer: A referring website is any website that links to a merchant’s website and from which a visitor arrives at a merchant’s website.
- Return Rate: The percentage of all items from orders in the time period that were returned again. These are returns for orders that happened in the given time period, rather than only the returns that happened in the time period.
- Return Visitor: Visitors who have returned after at least 30 minutes of inactivity for another visit to the same website.
- Revenue: Revenue is the total dollar amount that a store has received from orders over a given period of time, but depending on what report you are viewing, you may see revenue two different ways:
- Orders Revenue: This revenue number is available on the Store Overview and includes shipping, all discounts, and taxes.
- Merchandising Revenue: This revenue number displayed in the Merchandising Report. The reason this revenue amount is defined differently is because merchandisers have a very specific way they would like to view product revenue. The revenue on your Merchandising Report includes item-level discounts but does not include shipping, taxes or order level discounts.
- Revenue per Visit (RPV): Revenue per visit for a given time period. The revenue is divided by the number of visits.
S
- Shopped (in Purchase Funnel): A visitor is considered to have shopped when he or she has viewed a product on a merchant’s store.
U
- UTM: A simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name.
V
- Visitor: A visitor is a person who has visited a merchant’s store. Visitors can be people who have purchased something (customers), or people just browsing through.
- Visit: A visit is any time a person sees at least one page on a merchant’s store. All page views from the same person that occur within 30 minutes of each other count as the same visit.
- Visit Origin: The visit origin describes how a visitor arrived at the site. Although you will see specific visit origins such as “Visit from a Google Ads campaign,” the main visit origins will include:
- Direct Origin: A direct visit origin is when a visitor arrives at your store by entering the website’s address in their browser. In other words, the visitor did not arrive at your store by clicking a link to it.
- Search Origin: The search visit origin indicates a visitor arrived at your store by clicking on a link from a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
- Social Origin: The social visit origin indicates that a visitor arrived at your store by clicking on a link from a social network, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.
- Campaign Origin (UTM): Revenue over a given time period from visitors who made an order and arrived at the store from a link that included a UTM code in the URL. These are links that were tagged by the merchant, so we know it's from a specific campaign.
- Referral Website Origin: The referral website origin indicates visits who arrived at your store from any website that is not already included in the other visit origins.
