Akin to other industries, marketing best practices have emerged and evolved over time, leading to the creation of specific terminology to describe said strategies and tactics. And with wordy professional lingo comes acronyms—just imagine having to repeat, “Search Engine Optimization” over and over again when you can just use “SEO”.
Ok, so what is SEO, exactly?
And, for those of you who want an immediate answer to the question, “what is SEO?”, here it is:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.
Wikipedia.org
Of course, to those still learning about the world of marketing—especially digital marketing—many of these terms may be unfamiliar to you. Furthermore, there are a lot of acronyms to remember. So, we took the time to put together this Glossary of Marketing Terms to make things a bit easier to navigate and understand.
If you can’t find a specific term here, let us know so we can look into it.
Marketing Terms Glossary
These are the outdated steps a consumer goes through from the beginning of a purchase funnel all the way through to actually making their purchase. They start with noticing, then work through having interest, to deciding they want it, and finally actually purchase it. Typically marketing focuses on guiding a consumer through each of these phases of the funnel, however this has changed somewhat in the digital age.
This usually has a very complicated explanation of how software talks to other software. Essentially you can set up an API to have a set rule it enforces when interacting with other software. It’s like setting up a contract between one software and another. For example, Weather Underground makes it’s API information available to other weather websites and apps so once it’s set up they can automatically get the weather information from Weather
Underground for their app via the API.
These are businesses that provide services over computer networks. For example, a company that works with clients to send text message promotions to their customers.
Either a company serves other businesses or it directly serves consumers. Sometimes they do both. For example, a sports equipment company selling their products to sports shops. That would be a B2B arrangement.
In this instance, a business directly serves customers or consumers. For example, the sports shop selling its products directly to consumers.
This is a popular tool sales reps and sales leaders frequently use to help them determine whether their prospects have the budget, authority, need, and right timeline to buy what they sell.
B = Budget: Can they afford it?
A = Authority: Are they the decision-maker to be able to buy this?
N = Need: Do they actually need what you are selling?
T = Timeline: What’s the time frame to implementation?
Out of the total amount of visitors to your website, how many of them navigated away after only viewing a page? The percentage you get here is your bounce rate.
How much money did you have to invest in order to get a customer to purchase something from you? The amount you had to invest into research, marketing money, getting your sites and profiles setup and continuing to run well, etc. There are many costs that go into acquiring a customer. Knowing this monetary amount helps with projecting how much to spend to acquire a customer moving forward.
A U.S. law passed in 2003 that set the rules for commercial email and messages. This law means that users can opt out of emails and that if businesses continue to attempt to email them (e.g. spam) then there are penalties in place. This is why all emails require an “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of them.
A Canadian law passed in 2013 that regulates the sending of “commercial electronic messages.” CASL covers email, texts, instant messages, and automated cell phone messages sent to computers and phones in Canada.
Any kind of software application that manages the vast amount of content you have related to your brand. It may support your images, content editing, organizing, and publishing. Think: blog and social media content. Some applications do more than others but they are all considered to be a CMS if they are within the content management realm.
Let’s say you have a website and get some product advertising banners on it. Every time someone clicks the banner, buys something, or views the banner- you get money. Every advertiser and arrangement is different, for example you may just get paid when someone actually purchases something. However you make the arrangement, the amount you get paid is called “cost per action.”
Another online advertising model, in this instance with the web banner example, you’d just get paid a pre-set amount whenever the Ad is clicked. Another acronym you may see for this is PPC (pay per click).
This is when a company looks at the history of interactions it’s had with its customers and determines how it wants to interact with them in the future. In a simplified example, a company can see that a consumer opened all the emails about a particular product and clicked links to look at it, but didn’t purchase. So the company can send them a follow up email with a special promotion for that particular item.
A strategy to try to increase the amount of users that take action on something and convert into customers. E.g. Increase the conversion rate of users who visit a website and end up purchasing.
When you build a website using traditional coding like HTML, you use CSS code on top of it to make it look visually appealing. HTML is like the building blocks and CSS is the decoration. So if you were to add a snippet of HTML code to your website from your email service provider to try to collect email addresses, it likely has a very static look from the email company that doesn’t match your website’s branding at all. You would then use CSS to change the button color, the font, etc to make it look like it’s a matching part of your website.
Words like “click here!” “Subscribe now” “buy now” etc are all considered to be CTAs. It’s a specific instruction to users encouraging them to take a desired action. When done right, they provoke an immediate response.
How many users clicked on something specific vs. the total number of users that saw the link. E.g. out of everyone who opened an email and saw the link, how many actually clicked?
This is what we call the entire process a consumer goes through from knowing about your brand through to purchasing, purchasing again, interacting with staff, with the website, etc. Every little piece is part of a customer’s experience.
Domain Authority is a search engine rating metric created by Moz. DA rating is a score between 0 and 100 and this score calculated by evaluating a ton of different metrics some of which are; Moz’s very own MozRank, MozTrust, linking root domains, number of total links (similar to Trust Flow and Citation Flow). All these factors and more make up a site’s DA the higher the score the more authority that domain has (higher = better). DA is a predictor on how likely a website will rank. Now websites have a single score to compare themselves against other websites.
Domain Authority is a search engine rating metric created by Moz. DA rating is a score between 0 and 100 and this score calculated by evaluating a ton of different metrics some of which are; Moz’s very own MozRank, MozTrust, linking root domains, number of total links (similar to Trust Flow and Citation Flow). All these factors and more make up a site’s DA the higher the score the more authority that domain has (higher = better). DA is a predictor on how likely a website will rank. Now websites have a single score to compare themselves against other websites.
Direct Mail: Sending physical mail via post to recipients. Also known as “junk mail” as this no longer converts a cold audience into a customer anymore.
Direct Message: A message on a social media platform used to get in touch with followers of an account directly and in private. DMs can be sent from one person to another, or within a group. Most accounts only allow DMs from their followers, but many businesses allow DMs from anyone.
A system that controls your domain name’s website and email settings.
A company that offers email marketing or bulk mail. Keeping track of everyone and various campaigns in a personal email is impossible. These companies make it easy and well organized. They also take precautions to ensure you do not get flagged as spam when sending emails.
If you have a large amount of files to send (think an entire website of files, a ton of videos, etc) you can use FTP to transfer the files from one host to another over the internet.
Google provides a service for users’ websites that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and where the site visits are coming from. It can also measure conversions and sales. This is added to your website and then presented to you on a private dashboard.
This is the basic code used to make websites. If your website was a house then HTML would just be the foundation, walls, holes for doors and windows. But that’s all. See CSS definition for how to decorate your house / website.
A link back to your site from another website.
When you send a typed message to another person in real-time. E.g. text message, Facebook message, Skype chat, iMessage.
There’s a number assigned to every device that uses the internet. E.g. phone, laptop. This number is called an IP Address. An example IP address looks like this: 78.125.0.209
As a company you get to determine what your own KPI’s are based on the goals you are trying to achieve and what you want to track. Maybe a KPI for you is how many views you get on your blog and how many of them convert into subscribers.
This is a monetary amount associated with a customer that estimates how much money they are going to ever spend with the company based on their actions, demographics, purchases, etc.
This is used to track the amount of revenue a subscription-based business receives every month. Includes averaging lost customers averaging with the rate new customers subscribe.
This is a number from 0-10 that the measures the degree to which people would recommend your company to others. This number can be used to determine how to improve a company’s product or service.
To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of customers who would not recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from the percent of customers who would (promoters, or 9-10).
Links that take you away from your current website.
Page Authority is calculated the same as Domain Authority and has the same rating system (0-100). The difference is that Page Authority is a score for a single page on a website. Thus predicting the likelihood that that specific page will rank. This score can also be used to compare specific pages of a website to other specific pages on other websites.
How Google ranks software and calculates how well your page connects with the search words entered.
How many people viewed a specific web page. This isn’t general to the entire website, it’s for a particular page within a website.
Have you ever seen those squares with a bunch of dots on them on products or signs? These are called QR codes and they store website URLs or other information. You can scan them with your Smartphone’s camera and be taken to the information directly.
If you invested $100 into a marketing campaign and made $1000, you had a $900 return on investment. This amount is just how much you got back on an investment you made of any kind.
If you invested $100 into a marketing campaign and made $1000, you had a $900 return on investment. This amount is just how much you got back on an investment you made of any kind.
An RSS is a list AKA “ feed” or “channel” with a summary of a bunch of different websites.
Re-posting (or sharing) a tweet posted by another user on Twitter. This can be done by simply using the “retweet” button.
If you’ve ever used an online software or downloaded it onto your computer, you’ve used SaaS. For example, if you use accounting software that’s SaaS. These are typically on subscription.
When you search on a search engine and the top results are sponsored results, i.e. companies pay to have their related site come up above the rest to increase the likeliness you’ll click them vs scrolling down to the nonsponsored posts.
This is when you optimize your website and content in order to appear in search engine results for keywords you want to be associated with. This is organic (free) to implement whereas SEM (see above) is the paid version.
When you search for keywords in a search engine and the list of results appears, this page is called the SERP.
Companies that have between 10 and 500 employees.
Marketing throughout various social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) strategically for a brand.
Leveraging various social media communities to increase publicity around a brand.
An online advertising ad revenue model that focuses on weight or percentage among other advertisers.
A SWOT analysis gives a strategic view of the main opportunities and challenges that exist within a company’s brand or market. The result is an action plan containing the most important next steps in order to achieve success as a department or large organization.
Terms a user has to agree with in order to use a particular software, service, product, etc.
When users of a particular online system or service create content related to that business. E.g. a website about men’s health that accepts and features content from various contributors, paid or unpaid.
The part a user sees on a web application. E.g. when you interact with a website, that’s the UI. There is various code, databases, servers, etc that goes into a website. But the part users SEE is the UI.
The part a user sees on a web application. E.g. when you interact with a website, that’s the UI. There is various code, databases, servers, etc that goes into a website. But the part users SEE is the UI.
An address to a website or resource on the internet. It’s what you type into the top bar of a web browser so you can locate the site you want.
This is used to count the number of individuals visiting web pages during a given time. It counts each person individually, so if someone leaves the site and comes back they are still only counted as 1.
A person shares their experience with a product or brand in writing or verbally with someone else.
A person shares their experience with a product or brand in writing or verbally with someone else.