Terms and Concepts

The following are key terms and concepts used in the Optimizely Analytics product. See this Glossary of Terms for a comprehensive list of all terms.

Application​

An application is a logical grouping of objects for a particular business use case. Managing different use cases across teams or initiatives is an organizational convenience. Applications do not share any state among them.

Data source​

A data source is the enterprise repository of data – typically a data warehouse such as Snowflake or BigQuery.

Connection​

A connection is a pipeline between Analytics and your data warehouse. Analytics issues queries to your data warehouse through a connection. Every application has one connection.

Dataset​

A dataset is a tabular view (rows and columns) of data used for analytics. Datasets are logical views of data in your data source representing a business entity or activity, such as a user, session, ticket, account, or event.

Event Stream​

An event stream is a dataset representing events, such as user interactions in a mobile app.

Actor​

An actor is a dataset representing a business entity, such as a user, account, or document.

Exploration​

An exploration provides analytical insight, such as retention, conversion, churn, and engagement. It is built using an exploration template and includes a query definition and a resulting visualization.

Template​

A template is a predefined set of configurations for defining a particular object, such as an exploration. Templates offer an easy way to quickly author commonly used objects. Analytics offers templates for explorations, cohorts, derived columns, metrics, and datasets.

Dashboard​

A dashboard is a collection of visualizations organized in a grid view. Dashboards are typically used to monitor commonly used operational metrics.

Cohort​

A cohort is a group of actors sharing common properties or behaviors. For example, a cohort of enterprise users hosted two meetings within the first week of signup.

Derived Column​

A derived column is a calculated column of a dataset that is based on other columns of that dataset or related datasets. For example, a derived column of the User dataset – Engagement Cadence has daily, weekly, or monthly values for each user depending on their usage activity.

Metric​

A metric is a calculation that represents a business measurement. For example, the Average Session Duration represents the average time users spend in a session. The dimensionality of metrics is determined at the time of usage. For example, a report may look at the Average Session Duration for a particular cohort or users and a certain period.

Folder​

A folder contains objects that can be saved with a name. Folders logically organize objects such as datasets, explorations, dashboards, and so on. They are hierarchical, such as a folder can contain sub-folders. Users and groups can secure folders.

Catalog​

The catalog for an application is the repository of all metadata objects organized into folders. Users see parts of the catalog depending on their permissions.