Glossary of terms
Collection: Digital Analytics · Reference
A quick-reference glossary explaining the key Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager terms used throughout the bookingkit Digital Analytics collection.
Quick definitions for every term used across this collection — keep this open in another tab while you work through setup.
Event
Anything that happens on your website counts as an event: someone loading a page, clicking a button, adding a ticket to their basket. Google Analytics is built around this word instead of older terms like “pageview” — it’s what lets it show you a full booking journey instead of just a visit count.
page_view
The most basic event there is: someone loaded a page. It’s the starting point of almost everything else — a visitor can’t add a ticket to their basket without first viewing the page it’s on.
add_to_cart, add_payment_info, purchase
The three booking-specific events bookingkit sends automatically once your tracking is connected. Together with page_view, these four events are your entire sales funnel:
page_view— someone looked at a ticket or experienceadd_to_cart— they added it to their basketadd_payment_info— they started entering payment detailspurchase— they completed the booking
You’ll build this exact funnel in Step 2: Connect bookingkit and see your first report. For every event and parameter bookingkit sends, see Full list of events bookingkit tracks.
Measurement ID
A code that looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX. Think of it as your website’s membership number inside Google Analytics — it’s what ties your site to one specific property (see below). You’ll copy this during Step 1 and paste it into bookingkit during Step 2.
Property vs. account
These two get mixed up constantly, so it’s worth knowing the difference:
A property holds the tracking data for one website. This is what your Measurement ID points to.
An account is the folder a property lives in — and one account can hold several properties.
It’s entirely possible for two different properties — in two different accounts — to have the exact same name. If a report ever looks empty or wrong, double-check you’re in the right property, not just the right-sounding name. When in doubt, compare the Measurement ID shown in Admin → Data Streams against the one saved in bookingkit — if they don’t match, you’re looking at the wrong property.
Realtime vs. standard reports
Google Analytics has two different reporting speeds, and mixing them up is the single most common source of “my setup is broken” panic that turns out to be nothing:
Realtime (Reports → Realtime) updates within minutes. Use it right after setup to confirm your tracking code is working — it should show “1 active user” when you visit your own site.
Standard reports — including Explore and funnel reports — run on a separate, slower pipeline. They can take anywhere from about an hour up to 24–48 hours to catch up. A funnel report that looks completely empty right after you finish setup isn’t necessarily broken; it may just not have processed yet. Realtime working is the real confirmation that your setup succeeded.
Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Only relevant if you’re using Advanced analytics. A dashboard for managing multiple tracking tools on your site without touching code each time.
Container — the “box” inside Google Tag Manager that holds your tracking tags. You create one per website.
Tag — a single tracking tool living inside your container — e.g., “send data to Google Analytics” is one tag.
Trigger — the rule that decides when a tag fires — for example, “on every page load” or “when someone clicks the checkout button.”
Three IDs that look similar but aren’t
This is the part worth reading twice — these three codes look alike, get pasted into similar-looking fields, and doing the wrong thing with any of them breaks tracking silently (no error message, it just stops counting):
Prefix | Example | What it actually is |
|
| A Measurement ID — points directly at one GA4 property. Used by the Easy path. |
|
| A Tag Manager container ID — points at your GTM container, not at Google Analytics directly. |
|
| A Google tag ID — a newer, shared loader that can send data to one or more linked GA4 properties without a separate script for each one. |
A website should be sending its data through exactly one of these paths — either a direct G- tag (Easy path) or a GTM- container (Advanced analytics) — never both at once. See the FAQ if you suspect this is happening to you.
Still have questions?
→ Understanding website tracking with bookingkit — back to the start