Digital marketing terms can be confusing, even for people who work in the industry. At Avenue, our boutique consulting & coaching business for design, lifestyle, and wellbeing pros and brands, we are committed to providing clarity and transparency for our audience. Here is a glossary of terms often used in digital marketing and marketing in general. Enjoy!
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T Q U V
A
A/B Testing
A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a methodology for comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better.
Account-Based Marketing
A focused approach to B2B marketing in which marketing and sales teams work together to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Group
An ad group (Facebook advertising) contains one or more ads that share similar targets. Each of your campaigns is made up of one or more ad groups. Use ad groups to organize your ads by a common theme.
Ad Network
An ad network is a company that connects advertisers to websites that want to host advertisements. The key function of an ad network is an aggregation of ad supply from publishers and matching it with advertisers’ demand.
Ad Server
An ad server is an advertising technique used to make decisions to determine which ads will be shown to visitors on a website as a part of an ad campaign.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics lets you mix, match, and analyze data from any digital point in the customer journey. A competitor to Google Analytics.
Affiliate Marketing
An advertising model in which the company compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads. This is widely used in web publishing.
Alt Text
Alt Text is used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. If you want to optimize your images on your website for search engines, you need to add alt texts to them.
AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
AMP is a Google-backed project intended as an open standard for any publisher to have pages load quickly on mobile devices.
API – Application Programming Interface
API is how applications communicate with each other. To be able to connect two or more tools, you need to insert their API keys to certain spots. Also, check Integrations.
Attribution
Customer acquisition attribution is the science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. Marketers and businesses want to know how a sale happens, for example, how many touches a customer has with the brand before they buy.
B
Backlink
A backlink is when one website links to another with an anchor text. An example of a backlink is any article you find that links to another source or website. You can find examples of website backlinks all over the internet, especially on popular blog sites that link back to relevant content.
Banner Ad
Banner advertising refers to the use of a graphic display that stretches across the top, bottom, or sides of a website or online media property. They are used to drive traffic to the advertiser’s proprietary site, generate awareness, and overall brand consideration.
Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting uses people’s activities to determine which advertisements and messages will resonate most with them. It leverages behavioral data, such as where people are, or what they are doing in your app, on your website, or with your campaigns, to trigger personalized marketing campaigns.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is a practice used to get a site ranking higher in search results. These unethical tactics don’t solve the problem for the people who search for answers and often end in a penalty from search engines.
Bot
A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are simple and repetitive, much faster than a person could.
BoFu – Bottom of the Funnel
BoFU content is the final stage of the buyer’s journey—where prospects actively consume content to make a purchase decision. BoFU content certainly encourages a sale but continues to add value wherever possible, just like content designed for other stages of the funnel.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave immediately rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.
Breadcrumb
A breadcrumb is a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages. It provides links back to each previous page the user navigated through and shows the user’s current location on a website.
Business Listing
Business listings are an online summary of essential information for your business. It helps users find out about your business.
Buying / Buyer Journey
The pathway a customer makes to buy from you. This starts at the first touch point and ends at the first purchase, and can be repeated many times if a company offers several products and services to the same customer.
C
CAC
Customer Acquisition Cost stands for the total cost of sales and marketing. This term is used to identify how much a company pays per customer acquisition, to be able to determine the return on marketing, and optimize their growth activities.
Call To Action
The part of your marketing that tells your audience what to do next, e.g. “Click Here” or “Buy Now”.
Call Tracking Number
Call tracking is the process of tracking leads by inserting a tracking number in your paid ads, emails, landing pages, and website to see which of your marketing efforts are producing results. You use different phone numbers in different ads, which all lead to your customer support or call center.
Campaign
A digital marketing campaign is an online marketing effort put forward by a company to drive engagement, conversions, traffic, or revenue. A campaign has a set timeline, goal, and budget.
Channel
Channels (in marketing lingo) are anything that gets your product or service in front of your desired audience: social media platforms, emails, search engines, advertising, and more.
Chatbot
A chatbot is a software that simulates human-like conversations with users via chat. Its key task is to answer user questions with instant messages. Widely used in FAQs and customer support.
Churn Rate
Marketing: the rate at which people unsubscribe from marketing channels, such as email.
Business: the rate at which people unsubscribe from a service, such as a membership.
Closed-Loop Marketing
Marketing that relies on data from closed-loop reporting, or reporting from the sales team about what happened to their leads. This helps marketers make decisions on actions that are happening further down the customer buying journey.
CMS – Content Management System
A CMS is a software platform that helps users create, manage, and modify content online. The most popular CMS is WordPress.
Container Tag
A code used in web development that removes the need for multiple pieces of tracking codes being placed directly on the site; instead, one piece of code is placed on every page on a site, which holds additional third-party code.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. Blogging, video creation, articles, and audio such as podcasts are examples of content marketing.
Conversion Path
Identifies all the steps taken by a customer or user to get to a certain goal, identified by the marketing team.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors to your website that reach your desired goal. In short, the percentage of site visitors who become paying customers, alternatively the percentage of visitors who opt-in for your lead offers.
Cookie
Cookies are a small amount of data stored on a user’s computer, which is added to their web browser when they visit a website. This customizes the user experience and allows websites to track the user’s behavior.
CPA – Cost Per Acquisition
Synonym for CAC (customer acquisition cost). This term is used to identify how much a company pays per customer acquisition, to be able to determine the return on marketing, and optimize their growth activities.
CPM – Cost Per Thousand People
Cost Per Thousand (M = Mille in Latin) people. This is used to give an indication of how much your ads cost per reached audience of 1000 people. Ad Networks use this term as a measurement for how much you can earn per 1000 visitors to your page if you show ads to them. For example, a CPM 35 will pay you $35 per 1000 visitors.
Crawler
A crawler is a program used by search engines to collect data from the internet. When a crawler visits a website, it picks over the entire website’s content (i.e. the text) and stores it in a databank. It also stores all the external and internal links to the website.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management (system)
A customer Relationship Management system or platform manages and tracks your existing or potential customers.
CSS – Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML.
CTR – Click-Through Rate
CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR.
Custom Audience
Custom Audience is an ad targeting option that allows advertisers to target a specific audience, such as an uploaded customer list, or a well-defined list of certain characters. Custom Audiences are typically used on Facebook.
Customer Experience
Customer experience is everything that happens from the first touchpoint to the last.
Customer Journey
The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand.
Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle includes attracting, converting, retaining, and leveraging clients in order to boost revenue and brand, engaging customers throughout their entire buying journey.
D
DAM – Digital Asset Management (system)
Digital asset management, or a system to organize, store, and access digital content. This also helps manage rights and permissions.
Display Advertising
Display Ads are a type of online advertisement that combines text, images, and a URL that links to a website where a customer can learn more about or buy products. There are many ad formats. These ads can be static with an image or animated with multiple images, video, or changing text (also called rich media ads).
DA – Domain Authority
Domain authority is like your website’s reputation as a thought leader. The search engine uses your domain authority to make sure you can provide the highest-quality content about your specific subject matter. The higher the DA, the more trusted your site is (according to search engines).
Drip Campaign
A communication strategy using automated, pre-written messages over periods of time in order to nurture prospects or leads through the marketing funnel. Perfect for specific campaigns and introductions sequences.
DSP – Demand-Side Platform
A DSP is a system that allows buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple ad exchanges and data exchange accounts through one interface.
Dynamic Content
Web page or email content that changes based on the user and their data, location, time of visit, or device.
E
Earned Media
Earned media, or earned content, is any material written about you or your business that you haven’t paid for or created yourself. Although this type of media is always published by a third party, there are ways marketers can position themselves for earned media opportunities.
Email Blast
Email blast is the strategy of sending a single email to a large distribution list simultaneously.
Engagement Rate
A metric that tracks how actively involved your audience is with your content. Can be calculated by the number of interactions divided by the total followers.
Event Tracking
An analysis which is done by Google Analytics tracking interaction with certain events, where the events are website components such as buttons, downloads, links, menus, and search boxes.
Evergreen Content
Content that remains relevant long past its publication. Evergreen content attracts visitors to your business consistently and over time.
F
Facebook Business Manager
Facebook Business Manager is a tool that allows you to manage Facebook Pages, business assets, and ad accounts, as well as Instagram accounts and product catalogs, in one place.
First-Party Data
First-party data is information a company collects directly from its customers and owns.
FTP – File Transfer Protocol
A protocol for transferring files over the internet that allows for your website to be optimized for search engines.
Funnel
G
Geo-Targeting
Delivering content and advertisements to consumers based on their geographic locations. This is a great technology to advertise to local prospects, as well as when launching in a specific market.
Google Adwords
AdWords is Google’s ad system in which advertisers bid on keywords that Google users search. This is a type of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.
Google Analytics
One of the most popular digital analytics softwares, using Javascript coded onto your page to track and analyze details about your visitors.
GMB – Google My Business
Google My Business lets you engage with customers directly and manage how your business appears on Google Search and Maps.
GCS – Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service offered by Google that helps you rank, monitor, and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google Search results.
H
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce is an email that has failed to deliver for permanent reasons, such as the recipient’s address being invalid (either because the domain name is incorrect, isn’t real, or the recipient is unknown.)
Headers
A website header sits at the top of each page and serves a few very important purposes. It shows your logo and main navigation, and can also host an important Call-to-Action such as Book a call. Some websites also include display ads to their headers due to their premium online real estate.
HTTP – HyperText Transfer Protocol
HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.
I
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not.
Internal Links
An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website.
J
Javascript
An object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers.
K
Keyword
A keyword is a term used in digital marketing to describe a word or a group of words an Internet user uses to perform a search in a search engine or search bar.
Knowledge Graph
The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google and its services to enhance its search engine’s results with information gathered from a variety of sources.
L
Lead Nurturing
Building relationships with prospects throughout the funnel by engaging them, providing value, and educating them about the solutions that you provide.
Lookalike Audience
Potential customers to reach based on having similar demographics to your current best customers or subscribers.
LTV – Lifetime Value
The projected revenue a customer will generate throughout their lifetime. Calculate the total LTV as an average of each customer’s individual LTV.
M
Marketing Automation
Leveraging software to automate marketing activities, generally with repetitive tasks such as emailing prospects, SMS, and social media marketing.
Martech
Marketing Technology, or an umbrella term for digital marketing strategies.
Meta Tag
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s source code.
MoFu – Middle of the Funnel
MoFU content is what converts visitors to leads.
N
Native Advertising
The media such as interviews or articles content that resemble a publication’s editorial content but is paid for by an advertiser for promotion.
NPS – Net Promotor Score
A metric used in customer experience programs that measures the loyalty of customers to a company.
O
Omnichannel Marketing
A multichannel sales approach, such as through brick-and-mortar stores, phone, and online, that provides customers with an integrated shopping experience.
Open Rate
The percentage of opens per email.
Organic Listing
A listing that appears in search engines, for example in Google Search, because it’s relevant to someone’s search terms.
Owned Media
Owned media comprises marketing channels that a company has control over, such as its branded website and email marketing.
P
Page Authority
Page authority is a score that predicts how well a specific page will rank on the search engine results page. Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
Page Views
The number of users visiting a specific page on a website.
Paid Media
Paid media refers to external marketing efforts that involve a paid placement. Paid media includes PPC advertising, branded content, and display ads.
PESO
Peso stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media. PESO is an acronym for the big-picture, all-channels-inclusive way of communicating.
Pixel
Marketing pixels, aka tracking pixels, are essentially the tiny snippets of code that allow you to gather information about visitors on a website—how they browse, what type of ads they click on, etc.
PPC – Pay Per Click
PPC is a model of digital advertising where the advertiser pays a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.
Q
Qualified Lead
A person who has indicated an interest in a brand, making them more likely to become a customer.
R
Reach
Reach refers to the total number of people who have seen your ad or content. Think of reach as the number of unique people who view your content.
Referral Marketing
Spontaneously promoting a product or service to new customers by word of mouth.
Remarketing/Retargeting
Serving targeted ads to people who have already visited or taken action on your website, also known as retargeting. A form of digital marketing in which marketers serve ads to users who have visited their website, and who have or have not taken a specific action. Remarketing is an effective way to target people who have already shown some interest in your business or brand.
ROAS – Return on Ad Spend
ROAS is a measure of how much your business earns in revenue for every dollar spent on marketing.
ROI – Return on Investment
A measure of how efficient an investment is, calculated by the benefit of an investment divided by the cost.
S
Second Party Data
Someone else’s first-party data. You purchase this from the company that owns it, and there is no middleman.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
Using search engines to promote your business, for example, using Google Ads.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Unlike SEM, search engine optimization earns a free spot in search results by optimizing keywords, without paying Google.
SERP – Search Engine Results Pages
SERPS are web pages served to users when they search for something online using a search engine, such as Google.
SFTP – Secure File Transfer Protocol
SFTP is a more secure option than FTP, making it difficult for hackers to access your files.
Soft Bounce
When an email is able to reach the recipient’s mail server but is returned to the sender undelivered, often because the recipient’s inbox is full.
Source
In digital marketing, advertisers are commonly referred to as sources, while members of the targeted ads are commonly called receivers. Sources frequently target highly specific, well-defined receivers.
Spider
Spider or crawler is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index.
T
Target Audience
A specific group of consumers that most likely to want your product or service, and therefore, the group of people who should see your ad campaigns. The target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests, or a myriad of other factors.
Third-Party Data
Third-party data is bought from someone other than the original collector. You buy this data through aggregators who purchase other’s first-party data.
ToFu – Top of the Funnel
ToFu content is the first stage of the buyer’s journey. This is often used to build brand awareness and create traffic.
Tracking Code/Snippet
A tracking code is a snippet of JavaScript code that tracks the activity of a website user by collecting data. A Facebook pixel is an example of a Tracking Code.
U
UI – User Interface, also called GUI (Graphical User Interface)
UI is anything a user may interact with to use a product or a service. UI also focuses on the product’s visual look or function.
Unique Visitor
The number of people who visit your website during a specific reporting period, such as a month, This does not include returning visitors.
UTM – Urchin Tracking Module
UTM is a snippet of code attached to the end of a URL. UTM codes are also used to pinpoint specific sources of traffic to a website.
UX – User Experience
UX is focused on the user experience when using a specific product or service. UX focuses on the user’s journey.
V
View-through conversion
View-through conversion is a type of conversion tracking within Google that measures how many visitors saw your Google Display Network ad but did not click.
