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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.