Digital marketing definitions and terms (You need to know)

Search, SEO and site basics

1. Google Algorithm — the process Google uses to make sure the results in its engine are relevant to what the user asked for. It is kept tightly under wraps, and a large and undisclosed number of factors feed into it. It is what makes the results so accurate.

2. SEO — Search Engine Optimisation. The practice of using what we know about ranking algorithms to make our own websites rank higher in relevant search results.

3. Keywords — terms used on your website to help you connect with your target audience. They are specific to your business and are what potential customers use to find you. They are a huge part of SEO.

4. LSI Keywords — Latent Semantic Indexing keywords. Alongside your direct keywords, these help search engines find the relationships between your terms and concepts, which can support your SEO and drive traffic.

5. SERP — Search Engine Results Page. The page of results you see when you type a query into a search engine.

6. SEM — Search Engine Marketing. Not to be confused with SEO, which sits under its umbrella. SEM covers every way a business uses search engines to market itself, including PPC.

7. Impressions — when someone views your ad or a post on social media, it is usually recorded as an impression. The more impressions, the wider the reach.

8. Conversion — when a user follows through with the action a piece of marketing encouraged, whether filling in a form or making a purchase. They are converted from a user into a customer.

9. Conversion rate — the percentage of people who become paying customers after interacting with a piece of marketing, such as an ad.

10. Breadcrumbs — a navigation aid, borrowed from Hansel and Gretel but executed rather better. Breadcrumbs improve usability and support SEO by creating a logical path showing where a user has been and where they are in the site.

Paid advertising and ad performance

11. PPC — Pay Per Click. Buying ad space, usually from a search engine, and paying based on how many people click the ad. You only pay when the ad is working.

12. CPA — Cost Per Action. Similar to PPC, which sits inside this category. The business pays for a certain action taken by a potential client: clicking an ad, filling in a form, or purchasing.

13. CPC — Cost Per Click. How much a business actually pays for each click on its PPC ad.

14. CTR — Click Through Rate. A good measure of ad success: divide the number of people who clicked by the number of impressions.

15. ROI — Return on Investment. How much money a business gets back in profit from a specific marketing technique or campaign, which shows how well it worked.

16. Featured snippets — the short block of text that sometimes answers your question at the very top of Google’s results.

17. Ad extensions — extra snippets of information, from location to phone number, that businesses include in ads to increase click-through rate and add value.

18. Alt text — descriptive text shown in place of an image or video that cannot be loaded, and read aloud by screen readers.

19. Landing pages — the pages that appear in search results and that a visitor first lands on when they follow a link.

20. Advertising quality score — Google’s method of rating your PPC ads, determining your cost per click and ranking you in the ad auction. The exact weightings are kept secret, but it draws on click-through rate, keywords, landing page quality, account history and ad text relevancy.

21. Google Signals — by tracking users across devices, Google lets you learn more about your active audience whatever device or platform they use.

22. Predictive lead scoring — an algorithm that separates good leads from poor ones using a range of factors, so you follow up the leads most likely to be right for your services.

23. Structured snippets — part of Google Ads. A section of your ad where you list values that show the specifics of your products and services. If you sell coats, your values might be “trench coats, rain coats, fur coats, black coats”.

24. Programmatic ads — buying ads automatically and in real time as the page loads, targeting specific customers without a middle-man.

The funnel, tracking and ad types

25. Funnel — the system businesses use to take potential customers from first interaction through to the sale. It begins with lead generation, moves part of the audience into lead nurture, and moves the remainder down into sales.

26. TOFU — Top of the Funnel. The first and widest part, where the audience is broadest and the company is focused on getting noticed.

27. MOFU — Middle of the Funnel: the consideration stage. The audience is more targeted and the business has their attention.

28. BOFU — Bottom of the Funnel: decision time, where the business wants to convince leads to buy.

29. Tracking code — a small piece of code in the header or footer that lets a business track the data of users viewing the site and gather information about its audience.

30. Search advertising — the broader term for placing ads on search engine results pages, across all search engines rather than one.

31. Munchkin codes — a JavaScript tracking code created by Marketo. It tracks users on your website, monitoring traffic and using cookies to record behaviour.

32. Display advertising — the umbrella term for adverts you see on a site, whether an image at the side of the screen or an auto-playing video.

Content, inbound and audiences

33. Content marketing — content covers a great deal of material: blog posts, images, infographics, videos and more. Content marketing is the use of that material to add value, show authority and build a trusting relationship with a target audience. It is closely linked with SEO.

34. Boosted content — usually on social media, where businesses, groups or pages pay to push content up the feeds of their followers, or into the feeds of people who do not follow them.

35. Inbound marketing — drawing leads into a business using methods such as SEO, content marketing and social media, usually by adding value and authority to earn attention and trust.

36. Outbound marketing — the opposite: going after potential clients, usually through more traditional methods such as email marketing, cold calls and events.

37. On-page optimisation — improving a page’s SEO through changes to the page itself, such as adding keywords, alt text and authoritative links.

38. Off-page optimisation — improving a site’s SEO without changing the site, through techniques such as link building and social media marketing. Paired with on-page work, the two make a strong team.

39. Generation Z — the generation after the millennials, generally classed as born from the mid-1990s to somewhere between 2010 and 2012, depending on who you ask.

40. Lookalike audiences — an audience assembled by a platform, such as Facebook, that shares attributes with a group you provide. Submit your mailing list and the platform finds similar users.

Leads, engagement and site quality

41. Lead generation — drawing potential customers into your website through a variety of marketing techniques, attracting their attention and making them interested in what you offer. Those people are leads.

42. Engagement rate — a measure of how many people interact with your content. It counts likes, comments and shares, divided by the number of followers or views.

43. B2B and B2C — the two types of business transaction: business to business, and business to consumer.

44. CTA — Call to Action. A short piece of text that encourages users to do something: get in touch, visit another page, or make a purchase.

45. Buyer persona — a fictional character representing a typical user who would be interested in the business, used to make marketing more targeted.

46. Domain authority — a prediction of how well a site will rank in Google, calculated from a range of factors including inbound and outbound links, page loading speed, and how well the site is optimised across devices.

47. Bounce rate — the proportion of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. Plenty of clicks with a high bounce rate is not a good sign.

48. Header tags — your H1 through to H6 tags, used to structure content. They create the title and subheadings on a page and support SEO when used properly.

Email, traffic and content distribution

49. Total opens — the number of times an email from you is opened, including multiple opens by the same recipient.

50. Unique opens — the same measure, ignoring repeat opens by the same person. You might have 350 total opens but only 300 unique ones.

51. Email open rate — divide either total or unique opens by the number of emails sent.

52. Organic traffic — the number of users who reach a site from unpaid search results. Driving it up is the point of SEO.

53. Paid traffic — visitors who arrive because the business paid for marketing, such as PPC ads.

54. Contextual marketing — using tracked behaviour and past searches to generate ads targeted to a user’s interests rather than shown at random.

55. Content syndication — getting a third party to republish your content — a blog post, article or any web content — to reach a wider audience, usually with a backlink to your site.

56. Canonical tag — how SEO-savvy marketers handle duplicate content. Multiple versions of the same thing normally harm your ranking; the canonical tag tells Google which version is the master copy.

57. 301 redirect — a permanent redirect from an old URL to a new page, used when a business moves its website. It preserves the domain authority and SEO of the old pages.

58. 302 redirect — the same purpose, but temporary.

59. 404 error — the error page shown when a page is broken or no longer exists and the server cannot find it. You do not want these on your website.

Links, infrastructure and the technical layer

60. LinkedIn SSI score — your Social Selling Index. It reflects how well you present your professional brand, find the right people to connect with, build relationships and share insight.

61. Anchor text — the portion of content that carries a link.

62. Broken link — a link pointing at a 404, or one whose URL is misspelled.

63. External link — a link pointing to a URL on a different domain from the site it is linking from.

64. Link pyramid — a structured path of links between pages, where authority — often called link juice — filters down and is shared across several pages.

65. Link profile — a detailed analysis of all of a website’s external links, taking their quality and authority into account.

66. Reciprocal link — two websites linking to each other for mutual benefit. Both gain external links pointing at them.

67. CDN — Content Delivery Network. A system of servers that speeds up the delivery of pages by sending each user request to the server best placed to handle it.

68. CRM — Customer Relationship Management. Tracking users’ interactions with a company throughout their journey, as a means of improving customer service.

69. DNS — Domain Name Servers, the phonebook of the internet: a directory of domain names translated into IP addresses.

70. IP address — the series of numbers identifying each computer, allowing devices on the internet to connect to one another.

71. Downsell — offering a potential client a different service or product after they decline the first. It can be written into content, triggered on exit, or appear in any number of other places.

72. FTP — File Transfer Protocol. How files are transferred between a server and a user.

Tools, tracking and the user experience

73. Marketing automation — software that carries out repetitive marketing tasks for you, from social media comments to large email sends, automatically.

74. Meta title — the header text for each result in a search engine. Type Facebook into Google and theirs reads “Facebook - log in or sign up”.

75. Meta description — the text shown beneath the meta title in search results, usually around 150 characters, telling users more about the page they are about to click into.

76. Qualified lead — a user who has shown interest in your products or services and can move further down the funnel.

77. Sitemap — a list of the pages on a website, which can also show the relative importance of each page.

78. Spider — also called a crawler. An automated bot used by search engines to index web pages.

79. Unique visitor — a visitor recorded only the first time they visit, as opposed to every time they land on the site.

80. User generated content — any content created by users on a website, from comments to reviews.

81. Pixel — also called a tag. A short section of code that tracks users and gathers information, helping businesses monitor campaigns and serve relevant ads.

82. UX — User Experience. How pleasant or unpleasant a person finds a website or page to use. Every business wants their site to be easy to use, which is why UX matters.

83. Viral marketing — encouraging users to share content, or an experience with your brand, across the internet.

84. List segmenting — splitting a mailing list into groups based on different factors, so campaigns can be more targeted than a single send to everyone.

85. Churn rate — the calculated percentage of users who unsubscribe from a service, such as a mailing list.

Social, testing and everything else

86. Influencer marketing — using well-known people and social media accounts with large followings to promote a business, service or product.

87. Blacklist — where email marketing that looks spammy ends up. Being on one makes your emails less likely to reach inboxes.

88. A/B split testing — testing two variations of one campaign, differing in a single respect, with a small control group to find which performs better.

89. Keyword density — the number of times a keyword is used on a page, usually shown as a percentage of overall content length.

90. Keyword stuffing — forcing a large number of keywords into written content. It reads unnaturally and usually gets the page penalised. Do not do it.

91. Map pack — the group of local business listings Google shows in results relevant to a location-based query.

92. NAP — Name, Address, Phone number. Keeping these consistent across every site and platform is vital to ranking well, and stops customers getting confused.

93. Schema markup — code included in HTML to help search engines read a website better and rank it for relevant searches.

94. Slug — the part of a URL that comes after the domain.

95. Wireframe — the initial blueprint for how a website will look, produced during design.

96. Cross-device targeting — running campaigns across a range of platforms — web, social, apps — so a targeted campaign follows the audience between devices.

97. Overlay — the small ad that appears over the top of a video, usually near the bottom, often with an option to dismiss it.

98. View through — when a user sees your ad, does not convert immediately, but is tracked for a period and converts later. That conversion can still be attributed to the ad.

99. Disruptor — a company whose product changes an industry. Uber, which reshaped the taxi industry, is one of the best-known examples.

100. Dedicated hosting — when an entire private server is used to host one client’s websites.

That is the hundred

If you have read all the way through, you now know a good deal about digital marketing. If any of these still feel unclear, or you want advice on applying them, get in touch — we are always happy to share what we know.

You will find this glossary and our other guides on the resources page.