Digital marketing has now been around for almost thirty years, since the ability to make money from people using the World Wide Web, a whole industry sprang up to do so effectively.
Like most other fields of human endeavour, those in the world of digital marketing have come up with abbreviations and jargon, which can mean our emails don’t make much sense to people unfamiliar with the lingo. We’ve assembled a guide to what your digital marketer means when they use funny words.
Website Traffic
Traffic itself is an odd word, but generally means all of the visitors to your website. It’s often the key metric we use to evaluate everything we do to promote your business.
Hit
A hit refers to a user visiting a page on your website. It’s honestly a bit of an obsolete term these days, dating back to when people had visible counters on their pages to show how many visitors they received. These days you’re more likely to hear someone refer to it as a “pageview”.
Session
Whereas a hit or pageview is a visitor viewing a single page of your website, a session is that visitor’s entire visit. Sessions are typically measured in the number of pages viewed or the length of time the user spends on your website. While typically a longer session is a good indicator that someone is engaging with your content, it might also mean that the user can’t find what they’re looking for.
User
A website visitor is referred to as a user. Reports listing the number of users alongside number of sessions shows if an individual has returned to your website more than once during the reporting period. Before online privacy was something most people cared about, it could be quite easy to track visitors as they returned, even if they were using a different device. Legislation such as GDPR has restricted that ability now.
Landing Page
A fairly obvious one, the landing page is whatever the user saw first when they came to your website. While many sites have the homepage as the most common landing page, it’s often the case that you want visitors to see a particular page when they first visit your website.
Analytics
These are used to monitor your website traffic. The most common is Google Analytics (GA or GA4) which shows a wealth of information about where your visitors came from, what they looked at, and how they interacted with your site.
Channel
Understanding how traffic came to your website is perhaps the most important thing Analytics can tell you. At the simplest level this is broken down into channels. The most common are Organic Search, Paid Search, Referral, and Direct.
Source & Medium
Looking at where traffic comes from at a deeper level gives us the source and medium. The source is where the user came from (such as Google or Facebook) and the medium is the type of medium it comes from, was it from the web, an email or perhaps a paid campaign, cpc (cost-per-click).
B2B
One of the two forms of digital marketing audience, Business-to-Business means your target audience are other companies. This covers things like professional services or raw materials and has different challenges to marketing campaigns aimed at the general public.
B2C
Business-to-Consumer is an alternative, where your products or services are being marketed directly to the general public.
User Interactions with Your Website
UX
User Experience is the term used to describe the overall experience a person has when using your website. This covers everything from how easy your text is to read, how fast pages load, how easy your navigation is to use.
UI
User Interface covers how a person interacts with your website. It forms a core part of the user experience but solely focuses on how they use the elements of your website to accomplish their goals.
KPI
Key Performance Indicators are metrics you use to measure how well your marketing goals are being met. This can be something as simple as the number of sales or leads you receive from your website, to longer-term goals like customer retention.
Conversion
In an ideal world we’d be able to track the entire user journey from the moment they first encounter your advert, right through to them becoming a paying customer, and this is what we would refer to as a conversion. Unfortunately, it’s not always as straightforward as that, so a conversion will be the point that we can measure where a user takes a key step on that journey; maybe filling out a contact form or submitting an application.
Key Events
Similar to conversion, key events are specific interactions with your website that you want to pay attention to. This could be someone adding an item to their basket in your online shop or filling out a contact form.
Bounce Rate / Engagement Rate
Bounce Rate is now a dated term and referred to users who left your website almost immediately. It’s since been replaced with Engagement Rate, which is pretty much the opposite and shows how many users take an interest in your website.
Above the Fold
One of the key factors to your bounce/engagement rate is the part of your pages that is “above the fold”. A term taken from newspapers, it refers to what is immediately visible on the screen when a user first loads your website.
CTA
Call-to-Action is an element of a page which encourages users to do something. This can be as simple as including “call us now!” alongside your phone number. While that may seem like a no-brainer, actually having a CTA does increase the number of people taking that action.
Conversion Rate
This is simply what proportion of users of your website actually convert. If this figure is too low, then you may have the wrong users coming to your website or perhaps there’s an issue with the UX which needs to be improved.
GTM
Google Tag Manager is a means of adding additional functionality to your website. In its most common use, this is how your website is connected to Google Analytics.
Cookie
A cookie is a little piece of information stored on your computer by a website that you have visited. These can be very simple, such as if you prefer to use dark mode on the website or note, or they can hold identification about who you are and how you came to the website the last time you visited. There are laws about cookies these days you need to be careful using them on a website without permission.
CMP
Consent Management Platform. Because of the laws about cookies, there are a number of services available that can help you provide informed consent to your website’s users about what cookies your website uses and which ones they choose to accept or reject. A consent management platform does just this.
Organic Search
When you go to Google or Bing and type something into the search box, anything in the results that isn’t a paid ad counts as organic traffic.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is the traditional term for making a webpage that is attractive to and understood by search engines.
Keyword
A keyword (or KW) is a word or short phrase that a page has been optimised for, this means that if someone types that keyword into a search engine your website will hopefully be shown in the results.
Search Term / Query
This is specifically what someone has typed into the search engine when your website shows up. It differs from keywords because people in the real world type the damnedest things into search engines, but it can provide valuable insights into what you should focus your keywords on.
SERP
Search Engine Results Page. This is what comes up when you make a search. Back in the early days of the web the only thing that mattered was where you appeared in the results, but now we have to be concerned about a lot of things relating to the SERP. With all the additional features, how your listing appears is just as important as where it appears.
AIO / Generative Search
The “next big thing” in search has been the rollout of AI-assisted search results. These use AI to summarise information for a searcher. They generally appear for informational searches (i.e. the user is essentially asking a question). Appearing in these results requires a slightly different approach to regular SEO. Generative search is also very new, so it will likely undergo a lot of changes in the near future.
Google Algorithm Updates
All search engines carry out updates from time to time that affect which sites they show in the search results, but Google makes extensive changes quite frequently. Aside from the Core updates (fundamental changes to how their search works), they also release other updates such as the Helpful Content Update, or Spam Updates, which explicitly attempt to remove or promote certain types of website. These can affect millions of websites all at once and even if you don’t see your site’s position rise or drop, you can still be affected by the volatility that occurs as the update is rolled out.
Manual Action
Possibly the scariest thing in SEO is a “manual action”. This is when Google takes deliberate actions against your website. If Google feels your website is violating their rules, then they will penalise your site so it doesn’t appear in the search results. While sometimes they can be accidental, it’s unlikely that you will get a manual action without trying to break the rules. Appealing a manual action can take weeks to fix.
Paid Advertising
Perhaps the most common way of monetising services or content on the internet is through advertising, and there’s a reason for that. It’s because advertising on the internet works. Some of the terminology from online advertising has been taken from more traditional media (print, television, etc), but some is unique to the digital realm.
PPC
Pay-Per-Click is one of the common terms to refer to paid advertising and the most common billing criteria, where you pay for every click on your adverts.
Impressions
Put simply, the number of times your advert was shown. It doesn’t mean the user actually paid attention to it, just that it appeared on a page the user visited. Some advertising platforms also include “unique impressions” as a metric, which shows the number of individual users who have been shown your ad at least once.
Click
In most cases, what you want a user to do when they see your ad is to click on it. Most typically this would link them to your website (or maybe to your app in the App or Play Store). Other forms of advertising might include “interactions” rather than clicks, but for many platforms and campaign types, it is this click that is what you pay for.
CTR
Click-through-rate is the percentage of your ad’s impressions that resulted in clicks. This can be a useful metric to gauge both how well your ads are targeting your desired audience and how enticing the advert itself is.
CPC
Cost-Per-Click is the average value of what each click cost you. For many forms of marketing, the actual cost for each click is defined by an auction, which means you will spend more for clicks where there is more competition.
CPM
The other model of advertising pricing, Cost-Per-Thousand. This is based on paying for impressions and is typically used for
CPA/CPL
Cost-Per-Acquisition or Cost-Per-Lead is a key metric because it shows how much money you’ve spent to get one enquiry. This is a useful metric to use to determine how effective changes to the advertising campaign have been.
Search Keyword
Like with SEO, paid search advertising utilises keywords, but you simply select the keywords you want your ads to show for.
Negative Keywords
If your search keywords have possible ambiguous meanings or if you’re working in a clearly defined niche, negative keywords allow you to prevent your ads from showing when a search includes particular words or phrases.
Bid Strategy
In the past, how much you paid per click was based on how much you offered. This was called manual bidding and meant that you (generally) didn’t pay more than you were willing for each click. Campaigns today use bid strategies where you define what your goal is and the bidding is automated. This means you’re less likely to miss out on clicks that you’ve priced yourself out of the market for.
Audiences
An audience in this case is about people who have already interacted with your website and you can use this information to find more people who are similar.
Remarketing
Audience data can also be used to deliberately target people who have visited your website but either didn’t convert, or who might want to convert again. This is ideal for bigger purchases or B2B marketing where there’s a long thought process involved before someone commits.
Quality score / Ad Strength
These are two metrics Google uses to evaluate your search advertising. The Quality Score is a value showing how well your keywords are selected, it’s made up of three factors: Ad Relevance (how well your advert relates to the keyword), expected CTR (how likely Google feels it is that someone will click on your ad), and landing page experience (which is defined by how relevant the landing page is to the keyword and the general UX of that page). The Ad Strength is based on how well Google thinks you’ve written the headlines and descriptions used in your ad. Both of these factors can affect how much you pay for clicks, the better your quality score and ad strength the less you pay at the click auction.
Performance Max
The newest tool in paid advertising is Performance Max, which utilises AI to target your ads automatically. Both Google and Bing have Performance Max available which allow you to quickly set up an ad campaign covering their entire advertising networks. Unlike search campaigns, you don’t need to select keywords to target, the system instead works out what your landing pages are about and targets the most appropriate users to show your ads to, which can be further refined with audience signals and negative keywords.
