Stay on top of digital marketing jargon with this evolving glossary. Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro, we’ve got you covered with clear definitions of key terms and acronyms. The list is in alphabetical order and will be regularly updated with the latest industry terms.
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404 Error
A 404 Error occurs when a webpage can’t be found. It typically appears with the message, “Oops! This page doesn’t exist” or “Page not found.” This happens if a page has been deleted or the server can’t locate it. If it appears on your own site, it may be because a page was removed, but other sites or search engines still have the old URL linked or cached online.
301 Redirects
A 301 redirect automatically sends visitors from an old URL to a new one. It’s like filling out a change-of-address form when you move—users who try to access the old page will be redirected to the new one. This is typically used for permanent moves.
302 Redirects
A 302 redirect works similarly to a 301 but is temporary. It’s used when you need to send visitors to a new URL for a limited time, like during a promotion or temporary page update.
A
A/B Testing
A/B testing compares two versions of a webpage or other content to see which one performs better. A company will make a small change to a page (like altering a headline or redesigning it) and show both the original and updated versions to two different groups. Their responses are tracked to decide which version is more effective. A/B testing can be used for websites, emails, newsletters, and more, helping companies make decisions based on solid data instead of relying on guesswork.
Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are additional pieces of information that appear with your ads. They provide more context about your product or service, like a link to your reservations page, your business’s address, or a positive review. Ad extensions make ads more useful, and in this case, the more you add, the better.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based partnership where one party promotes another’s product and earns a commission on the resulting sales. For example, a blogger might review a brand’s shoes and include an affiliate link. When readers click and buy the shoes, the blogger earns a commission. It’s a win-win for both the merchant and the marketer.
Algorithmic Marketing
Algorithmic marketing uses AI, algorithms, and data analytics to automate and optimize marketing decisions. It helps businesses make smarter choices by analyzing large sets of data, improving efficiency and personalization in campaigns.
Alt Text (Alternative Text)
Alt text is a description of an image that appears when the image fails to load. It also helps search engines understand and categorize the image. Be specific with alt text — if you have an image of a house, don’t just label it “house”; describe it in detail, like “white saltbox house with a red front door.”
Analytics
Analytics refers to the data collected from users who visit your website or interact with your content. It tracks things like time spent on pages, visitor demographics, or engagement with social media posts. Essentially, any measurable behavior online falls under analytics.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is clickable text that links to another page. For example, “click here” could be anchor text, but it’s better to be descriptive — like using “learn more about pet adoption” to link to a pet adoption page. Be intentional with anchor text so it clearly matches the content on the linked page.
Automation
Automation is the use of software to carry out tasks that would otherwise be manual. For example, instead of sending hundreds of emails one by one, email automation software allows you to send a personalized email to thousands of recipients in just minutes.
Average Position
The average rank of your ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). It helps measure ad visibility and performance, showing how well your ads are placed. A lower average position (closer to 1) generally means better placement and can lead to higher click-through rates and campaign success.
B
B2B (Business to Business)
A business that sells products or provides services to other businesses. Think Microsoft or Slack.
B2C (Business to Consumer)
A business that sells products or provides services to consumers. Think Amazon.
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website that directs visitors to your site. It’s an important factor in SEO because search engines use backlinks to assess your site’s credibility and authority. It’s different from a regular hyperlink, as it involves external websites linking back to yours.
Banner Ad
Banner ads are digital ads displayed at the top, bottom, or sides of a webpage, often designed to grab attention with bright colors and bold text. These ads are a popular way for publishers to generate revenue — each click on the ad earns them a commission.
Banner Blindness
Banner blindness is the phenomenon where website visitors ignore banner ads, often without consciously realizing it, because there are simply an overwhelming amount of them on the internet.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO refers to unethical tactics used to manipulate search engine rankings, such as keyword stuffing, buying backlinks, or link farming. These methods may get you ahead in the short term, but can lead to penalties or removal from search results by search engines like Google.
Blog
A blog is a section of a website where businesses share content to engage their audience, often providing helpful information, advice, or entertainment. Blogs are commonly written but may include videos, images, or other formats to keep content fresh and engaging.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures how many visitors land on your site and leave without interacting with any other pages. In email marketing, a “bounce” means the email wasn’t delivered to the recipient.
Brand Affinity
Brand affinity is the emotional connection consumers feel with a brand, often built on shared values or experiences. Brands foster this connection by staying engaged with their audience and consistently meeting their needs, creating loyal customers.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which consumers recognize and recall a brand. Strong brand awareness means consumers immediately associate a brand with specific qualities or values, like how Apple is synonymous with innovation and style.
Button Ad
A button ad is a small, clickable ad, often placed on websites or apps. It’s like a mini banner ad and can be positioned anywhere on a page to encourage user interaction.
Buzzword
Buzzwords are trendy, often overused terms or phrases meant to sound impressive but can come off as vague or meaningless. Examples include “synergy” or “pivot.”
C
Call to Action (CTA)
BUY NOW!
When you see that on a page, it’s pretty clear what you’re supposed to do there. That’s what a call to action is. A painfully clear, sometimes aggressive direction to users on a website. It can look a little desperate, but literally everyone does it—including us—so it’s standard.
Chatbot
A chatbot is a computer program doing its best to catfish us. It plays human, usually doing customer service or informational stuff. If you use Bank of America, you’ve probably met the chatbot Erica. And, if you read the news at all, you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, another bot. You don’t need to worry about the AI apocalypse just yet, though. There’s a long way to go before those systems are capable of that. Whether we’ll get to that point or not…who knows?
Click Map
This is honestly a little creepy when you think about it. When you visit a website, it’s tracking you. Website creators can take that tracking data and make a little thing called a click map, which shows up like those infrared cameras for thermal imaging. It tells creators exactly where people are clicking when they visit the site. Red is a hot spot, blue is a…not hot spot. A click map is a good tool to find out if your buttons are working, or if there’s a place on your site that’s super confusing.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
So say you put an ad up on Instagram. You take the number of clicks, compare it to the number of views, and there’s your click rate. How many people clicked after viewing? CTR can be measured on digital ads, email campaigns, landing pages, and more.
Commerce Media
A form of digital advertising on retail websites that finds and leverages connections between media impressions and consumer behaviors. The correlating insights enable you to refine your target audiences, improve your content and customer experience, and ultimately increase sales.
Content Hub
Picture a wheel:
The center of the wheel is your content hub, or a main content topic. The spokes of the wheel represent internal links to additional content that supports or is related to the main topic.
Contextual Advertising
See, this sounds fancy, but it just means that the ad choices on a certain page are made based on the content of the page, and not the users visiting it. If you’re on a page that talks about glasses, you might see a Warby Parker ad.
Conversion Path
Remember Dora the Explorer? Remember her map, where she lays out her journey to wherever she’s going? That’s what a conversion path is. It’s a carefully arranged map that leads users to the end of the rainbow, aka to subscribing, or clicking, or giving whatever information the page wants you to.
Conversion Rate
People put a lot of thought into the conversion path to increase the conversion rate, which measures how many people actually got to, as discussed above, the end of the rainbow. If your conversion rate is 5 percent or above, you can start working on your evil laugh, because…MUAHAHAHA it’s WORKING! THEY’RE FALLING STRAIGHT INTO MY TRAP!
Crawler
Ugh, who thought of this? It’s such an ugly word. Like moist. *Shudders*
A crawler is a robot made to scan websites and index them. Search engines like Google and Bing use them all the time. Say the search is for “cats.” The bot will go through the Internet looking for pages that have something to do with cats, and spit out a nice long, long list. After that, Google or Bing can look at the list and decide what order to put the pages in, depending on how relevant they are.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Marketing ain’t cheap. All those ads and other desperate things companies do to get attention really do add up. Customer acquisition cost is how much money it takes to get one new customer. Take what you spent on marketing in a single year, divide it by how many customers you had in that year, and there’s your number.
Customer Experience
It’s all about the connection. How well you vibe with your customers. Customer experience is kind of broad, so you can break it down into these parts: what you’re selling, and how you’re selling it.
Make sure you’re selling an unbeatable product. It needs to be so good that people can’t ignore it like they do everything else.
Now you’re going to have to kiss a little ass. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of competition in the marketing game makes the service part of customer service more important than anything. When they do business with you, do your customers feel like the special snowflakes their parents probably told them they were? Do they feel like you cared about them? If the answer is no, you’re not doing your job right. Remember that happy customers are loyal customers.
Customer Pain Point
It’s an issue that a customer has in the marketplace. The term really escalated from the definition, don’t you think? Why so dramatic?
The pain point can be anything from expensive subscription fees (looking at you, Netflix) to bad customer support. There are official categories for the many, many pain points a customer can have, and those are productivity (e.g., too many products and no filters to narrow a search down), financial, support, and process (e.g., how clear your website is).
D
Demand Generation
This is mostly self-explanatory. Demand generation…generates demand? It’s sort of an umbrella term that covers the tactics sellers use to make people want to buy their stuff. More specifically, demand generation is about that first step: making people aware of the product.
Description Tag
A piece of HTML code that is…wait for it…a description of a webpage. The better your description tag is, the higher your site will rank on a search engine. So make sure your content and description are in agreement.
Digital Marketing
Right, okay so this is like when we use the human brain to study the human brain. A digital marketing blog defining digital marketing. A little paradoxical, no?
Let’s define marketing first. That’s the meatier word. Marketing is the word we use for the many, many ways we’ve come up with to get people to buy what we’re selling. If you’re a service provider, seller, or publisher, you’re marketing. If you’re on social media, you’re marketing. Honestly, the marketing world is so big and has so many crossovers with other sectors, that it’s hard to say where it starts and where it ends.
Now we throw the word “digital” in front of it. That just means that people are using computer technology to do the marketing. Images, video, internet, etc.
Digital Marketing Metrics
How do you measure marketing? How do you prove to someone that the weird slogan you came up with is actually doing something? Metrics. Such a buzzword. It’s the data used to track how people on the Internet are responding to a company’s marketing. You’ll probably hear these terms when metrics are discussed: conversion rate, bounce rate, clickthrough rate, conversion path.
Direct Traffic
No, this isn’t a crossing guard with a whistle and a bright orange vest. Direct traffic means people who visit a site *gasp* without being lured there by an ad. But wait, it also means the source of a visit can’t be traced. So your website’s direct traffic could be friends and family who just typed in your URL or a super shady fan of your site.
Display Network
Think of a world filled entirely with blank billboards waiting to be rented out. That’s kind of what a display network is—but, in our real world, those billboard spaces are scattered across websites and apps. Take Google Ads, for example. That’s a display network. You can buy ads, and target specific people using their searches. Like this: a pet store can put ads in front of people who Google “dog adoption.”
Domain Name
google.com, netflix.com, apple.com
Those are domain names. It’s how you find a website. Your domain name should match your business name. It’s just awkward if your business is called “Donuts4Lyfe” and your website is called bagels.com.
Double Opt-in
This is so *romantic*. After someone subscribes to your email list, you can send them a confirmation or verification.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! I love you so much!”
Ideally, that’s what a subscriber is thinking when they get that confirmation email. In reality, it’s kind of hit or miss. Good: it filters out bots and one-timers. Bad: it can be annoying to have the extra step and prevent new subscribers from actually subscribing.
Drip Campaign
When you use a series of pre-planned emails to customers and potentials to boost sales and interaction. Since there’s so much email automation software out there, it’s easy to set up a drip campaign without hassle. Then you can sit back and let the software do its work.
E
Email Automation
What is email automation, you ask? A lifesaver. It honestly gives me chills to imagine what it was like before, when people had to type out individual reply emails to hundreds of people. We are so, so lucky to have software that just…does it for us automatically.
E-Commerce
Online shopping. That’s what it is. A lot of the larger sellers have both online and physical stores, but many small businesses are completely online. A rough estimate has us at over 12 million online sellers in the world today. That’s just—I mean, can you imagine how big a mall would have to be to fit everyone in there?!
Email List Segmentation
People are different. People are *unique*. It’s not a good idea to send the same email to every single person on your contact list. Email list segmentation is how marketers tackle that. Grouping people by their similarities makes it easier for marketers to tailor communication specifically to their interests, and keep them feeling special. So, on Mailchimp, you might have a full list of 1,000 people, and then segment them into college students, young professionals, mid-level professionals, and senior executives.
Email Marketing
A direct way to let customers and potential customers know about new products or services. It’s a tricky thing, walking the fine line between just enough communication and too much communication.
Email Spam
Well, this is an ugly word. It brings gross things to mind. Email spam is anything that you get in your inbox that you a) didn’t sign up for and b) don’t want. Unfortunately, everyone with a shred of a presence on the Internet is very findable. Spam will follow you wherever you go.
Engagement Rate
This is how you find out if you’re as cool or interesting or unique as you think you are. So, you posted something on your blog. It got one ♡ and zero comments and shares. …Not great. That low engagement rate means you need to step up your game, like a lot. Social media is where you’ll talk about engagement rate the most.
Ephemeral Content
Content that capitalizes on FOMO and is only available for a short period of time, thus encouraging users to actively pay attention to your content.
Exit Rate
Not to be confused with bounce rate, exit rate tracks how many people leave a website page. Let’s say you go to your favorite online store, click on a pair of shoes, then leave to try a different site. Exit rate would be measured for the last page you were on, which is the pair of shoes.
Unlike bounce rate, a high exit rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A high exit rate on a “Thank You For Your Order” page, for example, makes sense.
F
Facebook Ads Manager
Create and run your own ads on Facebook! Now that it’s rebranded, this handy tool is under what’s now called Meta for Business. You can also track your ad performance, and track billing and payments.
Facebook Audience Insights
This is how you stalk your fans in return. Audience Insights collects information from people who visit your page—things like demographics, geography, and more. Now that Audience Insights is under the umbrella of Meta Business Suite Insights, you can get data from Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook Messenger Bots
Remember chatbots? Facebook has them doing the customer service grunt work over FB Messenger.
G
Geofencing
I don’t know why, but this sounds so sinister. Everyone is tracked these days, and geofencing is just another way of using that tracking data to serve you stuff based on where your location is. Think of Snapchat! Depending on where you are, Snapchat shows you certain ads and lets you use certain filters.
So, a geofence is just a virtual boundary that borders a specific geographical area. Geofencing utilizes IP addresses to target a localized audience by making certain ads available to users within the boundary.
Geotargeting
Let it be known that geotargeting is different from geofencing! One more time, louder for the back: geotargeting and geofencing are not the same!
The difference is that geotargeting considers location in addition to specific consumer criteria, like behaviors, interests, and demographics. So if you’re walking past a McDonald’s while listening to Cardi B on repeat, an ad might pop up to promote the Cardi B meal. Honestly, not mad about it.
Tip for remembering the difference between geofencing and geotargeting:
Geotargeting is ordered after geofencing alphabetically, and also considers more factors.
GIF
<insert funny gif that explains what a gif is>
An excellent form of communication. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so why not take a short segment of a moving picture and maybe slap 3-5 clever words on top of it? Best of both worlds plus some sparkle.
Aside from the meme potential, a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is just plain old eye-catching. People usually use them to spice up emails. Also, watching a GIF loop over and over again is strangely hypnotizing.
Google Ads
This is an online advertising service run by Google (*in a Professor Snape voice* obviously). Companies do all sorts of things from create and run ads, to pay to rank higher in search engine results.
Google Algorithm
This is a two-parter. First, let’s make “algorithm” really simple. It’s a step-by-step procedure that solves a problem. Following a recipe to bake a cake is an algorithm.
Now we can add Google. The Google Search algorithm is the power behind how search results are generated and ranked. It’s updated at least twice a day, and the changes are barely noticeable. Say you Google the word “rock.” The algorithm figures out what you mean (like a stone or Dwayne Johnson), finds the most relevant and credible information on the Internet, and then presents it to you in a nice bundle of 5,340,000,000 results.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the hub for tracking everything on the Internet. It’s the ultimate peek behind the curtain at the Internet machine. It looks at user traffic patterns, website performance, and allll the metrics you can imagine. It’s totally free, too, so it’s a favorite among small businesses who want to grow.
Google My Business
A Google My Business account lets an owner control their business page on Google. Almost all online retailers have a managed business page on Google. It helps customers find them, and helps businesses engage with their customers.
Google Search Console
This is a free tool that enables you to monitor and maintain your website’s presence and performance in Google’s search results. You can use this tool to ensure Google can locate and crawl your website, solve indexing issues, and review traffic data and backlinks.
Guerilla Marketing
This type of marketing is all about getting attention by doing weird things. It’s usually super low-budget, and is a fast and dirty way to get results. It’s like a flash mob: unexpected and sometimes irritating, but you can’t look away because it’s just so odd.
H
Hard Bounce
Ouch, REJECTED. When you send an email and immediately get some sort of “not delivered” message back, that’s a hard bounce. It could be that there’s a typo in the address, or that they just…don’t want you :’(.
Hashtags
A #hashtag is a #socialmedia #thing that #sorts #content. There’s a fine line between #relevant hashtags and desperate hashtag stuffing. Don’t be desperate. Be relevant.
Heatmap
A fun way to display data. It uses thermal imaging colors to show how people interact with a site. Red is a high traffic area, blue is low traffic. So, an “order now” button could be bright red if a product is selling well, or blue if it’s not. A click map is a type of heatmap.
HTML Banner
It’s like a banner ad, but make it HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). They’re fast-loading, high-quality, animated, and can be adapted for desktop and mobile. There’s a little code that goes into making an HTML banner, but that’s nothing a YouTube tutorial can’t fix.
HTML Email
An email written using HTML instead of plain text. …What does that mean??
Plain is plain. No images, no links, no fancy fonts.
HTML is the opposite of plain. With HTML, you can code all sorts of things into an email. Graphics, embedded images, maybe video. Just…be careful with this. Too much, and the email will load s l o w l y, just like a buggy web page. Also, not all inboxes are formatted to work with HTML emails.
House List (aka Retention List)
Once someone subscribes to your site or opts in or interacts with it in some way that gives you their information, they go on the house list. All of your customers and subscribers are on that list. Using that info, you can send promotional emails, newsletters, and more.
HTTP
No, I didn’t stutter. Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP. This is how you connect with a web server. If a domain name is where a site is located, HTTP is what gets you to the site.
HTTPS
The encrypted version of HTTP. More secure. More reliable. Only at Verizon.
Hyperlink
Think of it like a signpost that you can click on and instantly be teleported to that location. A hyperlink uses HTML code to connect information across different web pages. It usually looks like this. Don’t confuse hyperlink with backlink. Every link is a hyperlink, but only some are backlinks.
I
Impression
An impression happens when your content loads and someone has a chance to look at it. It’s easier to count impressions when your ad or post is online, because you can track individual clicks. But if your ad is a billboard outside, the number becomes more of an estimate because you have to include everyone on the street, cars passing by on the highway, people working in the buildings nearby…it’s a headache ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a crafty little approach to marketing that focuses on getting customers by providing solutions to their problems. The technique looks at what customers want and need, and gives it to them, establishing loyalty and long-term relationships.
Incentivized Traffic
It’s a tough marketing world out there, and you do what gotta do to get ahead. Some people buy followers, and some people buy clicks. Incentivized traffic is made by paying visitors for their attention. It’s not always an exchange of cash. It could be a free ebook, a game token, or a discount on a product.
There’s a fine line to walk here. If too much of your traffic is incentivized, not only is that bad for your budget, it also looks bad to potential customers. They’ll think your website or product probably sucks if you have to pay people to notice it.
Influencer
We have a love-hate relationship with this word today because there are just so many “influencers.” And on every platform, too. An influencer is a person with a large, loyal following on social media. Companies use influencers as brand ambassadors, or make deals with them to get to their followers through them. Symbiosis.
Instagram Advertising
Advertising via Instagram. This is actually really effective. The majority of online shoppers are also on Instagram, making it an easy way to catch their attention. Most Instagram ads look fun and cool, which is even more attractive to see on a social feed.
Instagram Stories
It’s a feature of the Instagram app that lets people put photos and videos on their profile that disappear in 24 hours. When someone posts a story, it appears at the very top of a follower’s feed.
J
JavaScript
A programming language that adds spice to a webpage. Without JavaScript, the Internet would be a very boring place. Dropdown menus, pop-ups, animations…those are all things done with JavaScript.
K
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
A celebrity in the marketing world, it’s rare to go a day without reading or hearing about KPIs. Where metrics measure day-to-day performance, KPIs track long-term performance and are tied to more significant decisions about a company’s finances, strategy, and so on.
Keyword
A keyword is a word or a group of words that match what people are searching on Google or other engines. The more you incorporate keywords into your posts and website, the better chances you’ll have at appearing high up in the search results.
Keyword Density
How many times does a keyword appear on your web page? What percentage does it make up of the blog? The number that answers those questions is your keyword density.
Keyword Phrases
Keyword, but make it more. Phrases are a good way to specify your content. If you’re a really niche website, it’s better to go for really specific keywords and phrases for clarity.
Keyword Research
This is how people find the right keywords to use in the first place. If you work in SEO, this is a big part of your job. Keyword researchers look at the most searched words and phrases, and their related searches.
Keyword Stuffing
When every other word on a page is a keyword. Keyword overload. People try this to fool search engines, but it tends to just get their site banned or wiped instead.
Keyword Tags
These are a type of meta tag that pop up in the HTML code of a web page. They should be accurate to what your site’s purpose is, otherwise a search engine will just get confused. If it’s a cooking site, the keyword tags better be cooking-related.
L
Landing Page
A landing page is the web page you end up on when you click on a link in some form of marketing campaign (email, socials, etc.) They’re usually standalone pieces, and filled with ultra specific content for a single campaign.
Ever visited the Airbnb website? Chances are you’ve seen their “become a host” landing page. Now that’s a fabulous page with clear intention.
Landing Page Optimization
The how-to of making your landing page more attractive to potential customers. Some common strategies are simplicity, clarity, and scarcity techniques.
Lead
A lead is any person who could become a customer. If you have a physical store, everyone who walks in is a lead. If your store is digital, a lead could be someone who just subscribed to your mailing list.
There’s a joke to be found somewhere in this…once you remember that “lead” can also be defined as a leash for a dog or other animal. Think about that.
Lead Generation
So you want more leads, and eventually customers. That makes sense. Then you better find some cool new ways to get people interested in what your business is selling. That’s what lead generation is: figuring out how to attract people to your site or store.
Lead Nurturing
People love feeling like they’re special. They especially love feeling wanted. Lead nurturing involves a very specific kind of pandering to potential customers that nearly every business has to do at some point. It’s almost like a rite of passage on the journey to company growth.
Nurturing becomes necessary when your business has a lot of interest, but not many people sealing the deal with a purchase. This is when you step in with your best customer service smile and start flirtin—ahem, marketing. Personalize emails. Stay in touch consistently, but not overwhelmingly. Offer a discount on the first purchase. Just make them feel like they matter to you.
Link Building
Like a spider weaving its web, you too can build a sinister, nearly invisible network of hyperlinks that all lead back to your site…MUAHAHA! They’ll never see it coming!
No, but seriously, when link building goes right, there are massive benefits to your site. The more your site is connected to others via hyperlinks and backlinks, the more visible and credible it will be. Search engines will love it. From there, it’s just a cascade of goodness. Higher search results ranking leads to more traffic, which leads to leads, and ultimately more customers.
Live Streaming
The utterly terrifying moment when you broadcast a live video in real time to your audience on the Internet. This usually happens on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and more. News outlets also use live streaming to draw in viewers when covering special events like the New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York.
Beware, live streamers. There are absolutely zero take backs here. There is no hiding. If you make a regrettable mistake, it will live forever on the Internet—to your eternal shame. Don’t ever believe a platform if it claims the footage will be erased after the live stream ends. Someone always records. Be smart, and be careful.
Lo-Fi Content
This refers to content that has a more authentic, personality-driven feel to it. Think of content that feels less glossy and more unfiltered—content that feels more “real” and relatable.
Lo-Fi Social Media Content
This refers to lo-fi content specifically seen on social media platforms. Lo-fi social media content has become quite popular, especially among influencers. Think of videos that have a DIY quality and/or minimal editing.
Long Tail Keyword
It’s a keyword, but it’s 3-5 words instead of one or two. Long tail keywords are more specific, and help a site get to those niche audiences. Like, I don’t know…Bronies?
M
Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is your ultimate battle plan of advertising strategy. It covers audience outreach and PR, as well as the specifics of each campaign. A solid plan significantly increases your chances of success, but there’s a shred of luck involved too. There always is. May the odds be ever in your favor.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
We mentioned what a lead is above, and now we’re going to get a little more specific. A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is someone who has shown interest in buying your stuff. They’re the window shopper or casual browser in the store.
Media Kit
Also known as a press kit, a media kit is a handy little promotional package (mostly digital, sometimes physical) meant to summarize a product or a brand. People normally send out media kits before a product launch or a similar event. A good media kit is enticing enough to get the recipient’s genuine interest in the product, not just the perks that come with it.
Meta Descriptions
It’s a tidbit of text, under 160 characters, that gives you a summary of a web page’s content. Meta descriptions actually don’t affect SEO, but they can be a deciding factor in whether or not someone clicks on your site. Keep it short, sweet, and accurate.
Meta Tag
Meta tags are a bit like meta descriptions, except they’re not visible anywhere except in the source code of a web page and they do occasionally affect SEO. They also describe a page’s content in nice bite-sized chunks of text.
Mobile Advertising
It’s your usual marketing techniques, but make it smartphone formatted. Since most people have some sort of smartphone nowadays, reformatting an ad to fit the dimensions of a phone screen is very important. In fact, it’s more and more common for someone’s first contact with a piece of content to be on their phone.
Mobile Page Optimization
Like mobile advertising, mobile page optimization is about making sure your website has a mobile screen format—whether that’s streamlining and enlarging blocks of text or putting the menu into a single icon. It’s vital for all websites to have mobile functionality, otherwise you’ll lose a huge amount of traffic.
N
Niche Marketing
This is a type of marketing that targets really specific demographics. Smaller groups of people can give you more authentic and meaningful engagement. If you’re selling climbing shoes, one campaign might target free solo climbers.
No Follow Link
When a “no follow” HTML tag is added to a link, it’s telling search engines to ignore it. They don’t affect search results page ranking. The tag was originally created to fight blog comment spam, and now they’re a tool you can use to direct more traffic to your site.
Non-Endemic Ads
These are ads shown on a retailer’s website from non-competing brands that share overlapping audience demographics.
For example, say you run an online bookstore and have ad space available for purchase. If you sell ad space to a company that sells handmade blankets and pillows, their ads would be considered non-endemic. This is because your online bookstore doesn’t sell blankets and pillows, but your audiences have overlapping interests.
O
On Page SEO
Everything you can do on and in your website to improve how you rank in search engine results is called on-page SEO or onpage optimization. Common tactics include using more keywords in blog content, writing an awesome meta description, or meta tags.
Open Rate
How many people actually opened the email you sent? That’s what an open rate measures. A good open rate hovers around 17-28%—depending on your industry.
Opt-in (Subscribe)
Offering a potential customer the choice to get marketing emails from a specific company. You’ll usually find this on a checkout page for a store’s website.
Opt-out (Unsubscribe)
When your alma mater keeps begging you for donations, you can scroll all the way down the email to find that teeny tiny “unsubscribe” link. That’s how you opt out of receiving emails. Most of the time, it works, and you shouldn’t see another email from the sender. Other times, they ignore it and keep sending you emails because they’re annoying and desperate and spammy.
Organic Search
Any traffic to your website that comes from people who haven’t interacted with any of your paid ads or email campaigns is organic traffic. If you tell a friend or family member about your blog, and they go and Google it the next day, that’s called an organic search.
P
Page Performance
Page performance looks at the overall effectiveness of a web page. How fast is it loading? How is it ranking in search engines? How many people are visiting? From those visitors, how many are subscribing or purchasing? Etc, etc.
Page Rank
How high your page ends up in the search results of a search engine like Google. The higher your rank, the closer to the top you are.
Paid Advertising
Any ads you pay for. It could take the form of a banner ad, a social media ad, or more. One advantage of paid ads is that they get your brand in front of large audiences effectively.
Pass Along Rate
Remember those weird chain emails of the early 2000s? If you were tracking one, the pass along rate would measure how many people sent the chain mail on to someone else.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
You only pay your ad publisher when someone clicks on your ad.
Pay Per Lead (PPL)
You only pay your ad publisher when someone becomes a lead (subscribes to a mailing list, expresses interest in buying, etc).
Pay Per Sales (PPS)
You only pay your ad publisher every time someone buys your product after clicking on your ad.
Permission Marketing
Consent is so sexy. Permission marketing relies on getting audience opt-ins to receive promotional information from a company. In checking that your potential customers actually want to get your emails, you’re increasing the chance that those potential customers take that last step to become customers.
Podcast
A podcast is an audio series hosted on the Internet. Ever listened to “My Favorite Murder”? True crime is one of the most popular podcast categories. Other popular categories are interviews, comedy, and society/culture.
Positioning
Where do you see yourself in five years? Um…in a house, hopefully. With a dog or a cat. And a paid off college loan.
Just like how you envision life for yourself in the future, brands think about where and how they want their product or service to be positioned in the market. Since its founding in 1976, Apple has managed to position itself as the largest consumer electronics company in the world.
Pop Up Ad
The ultimate pain in the butt for many people in the early digital age. A pop up is an ad that opens a new browser window, demanding your attention RIGHT NOW! Attention-grabbing, yes. Effective, mm…sometimes.
Portal
Think of a big bulletin board with a whole bunch of marketing resources and assets that everyone can use. That board can also gather data and analyze performance. That’s a marketing portal. A one-stop shop for a company’s marketing team.
Programmatic Advertising
A digital approach to purchasing digital ads that utilizes software instead of people. Compared to a more traditional purchase approach, programmatic advertising is much more efficient, less expensive, and ultimately more consistent and reliable.
Q
QR Code
You know those black-and-white squiggly patterns that sort of look like a square barcode and work with your phone’s camera? Those are QR codes, and they store various forms of information. Short for Quick Response, QR codes help users quickly access information like coupons, phone numbers, and direct links to web content.
Quality Score
A Google Ads tool that rates your ad compared to others on a scale of 1-10. A high score is good. It means your ad is more relevant than others to the keyword it’s tied to.
Query
“who would win in a fight between batman and iron man”
OR
“why men lie”
Everything (no matter how weird) you put in the search bar of a search engine is a query.
R
Ranking
Where your site or page ends up in the results of a search engine. Rankings are tied to keywords, so your site might rank high for one and low for another.
Reciprocal Links
If an external website puts a link to your site on their page, and you put a link to their site on your page, that’s a reciprocal link. It’s a nice way to boost both sites’ rankings.
Referral Traffic
Traffic to your site that comes from customer recommendations. This can happen without asking, if your brand is just That Good. You can also ask your customers directly to recommend your products to their networks, but it’s best not to rely on that.
Relevance Score
On Facebook Ads, relevance score is a predictive value Facebook assigns an ad based on how it thinks the target audience will respond. 10 is the best, 1 is the worst. If your ad has a high relevance score, it’ll actually cost less to send it out.
Remarketing
Have you ever gone to your favorite online store, added a few items to your cart, realized your wallet was screaming in protest, then closed the tab without purchasing? Cut to the next day, and you get an email from that store saying, “Hey! Are you sure you don’t want to buy this stuff?” It’s called remarketing. Brands want you to remember them, to think about them and buy their products. So they’ll do what they can to steer you back to them if you leave.
Return On Investment (ROI)
You give and you get back. That’s what investment is supposed to be. “Getting back” is the bread and butter of ROI. Everyone wants to make more money than they spend, and get that positive ROI. Life isn’t always fair, though.
Robots.txt
A text file in a website server that talks to crawlers and tells them what they can and can’t look at. If your website has confidential information on it, then it’s best to tell a crawler to stay away from that.
Run of Network (RON)
When your ads go up on a collection of websites in an ad network, that’s RON. You can’t choose specific sites for your ads, so RON is better for spreading awareness instead of targeted ads.
Run of Site (ROS)
Unlike RON, ROS means your ads will go up on the pages of a single site. Again, you’ll lose control over your ad placement, so ROS is better for broader audience ads.
S
Sales Accepted Lead
A sales accepted lead is an MQL that has been sent to the sales team.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
An MQL that has been sent to the sales team, verified, and accepted. Efforts can now begin in earnest to turn them from a lead into a customer.
Search Algorithm
See Google Algorithm. Long story short, it’s how a search engine gets its results.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
All the tools and tactics people use to get their website or page to rank higher in search results. Tags, keywords, metadata, all of it has to do with SEO.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Paying for ads to appear on search engine results is called search engine marketing. Google and Bing are two of the most popular engines for SEM.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
After entering a query into the search bar, you press enter and the results pop up. That’s it.
Single Opt-In
Unlike double opt-in, a single opt-in is a one and done. Enter your email, send the form, and boom. You’ll get emails from the people you just subscribed to.
Social Listening
Remember that person in middle school who was obsessed with popularity and cared a little too much about how other people perceived them? We’ll be kind and call that person a very active social listener. Actually, social listening is a super necessary skill to have if you want to keep improving your product and company. Forget the narcissistic 12-year-old; in the adult world, staying on top of what your audience and customers think about your brand is just doing due diligence. The better you know your customers, the more effectively you can be a hero and solve their problems for them.
Social Media Traffic
When people get to your site by finding it on social media first, that’s cleverly called…social media traffic.
Social Networking
So you have your product, you have your website, you have social media accounts. Now, go one step further and engage. If you’re not approachable, you’re missing out on building consumer trust in your brand. That doesn’t mean you have to answer every single comment. It just means you need to get your customers to see themselves as part of a community. Your community.
Social Selling
Using social media to scout out potential customers is social selling. Doing customer service and product announcements is also social selling. In this day and age, if your social media game is not on fleek, you’re going to find it very hard to grow.
Soft Bounce
Unlike a hard bounce, a soft bounce is fixable. Maybe it’s a weird internet connection or temporary server issue. Try again later, and it should work.
Spam
Junk email. Stuff you did not subscribe to. There’s some really gross spam out there.
Subject Line
A line of text that’s supposed to tell you what the email is about. In marketing, it’s more like a “please don’t delete this, we’re actually interesting” line.
T
Target Audience
The people you’re aiming for with a marketing campaign. Sometimes a target audience forms naturally, sometimes not. Like, pacemakers are not going to be marketed for 18-year-olds.
Text Ad
Text ads are—you guessed it—ads that use text and text links. While most ads feature images, text ads are great for PPC.
Title Tag
An HTML tag that gives a web page a title. This is super important for SEO. Without a title, it’s hard for search engines to figure out if your page is relevant to a keyword or not. Also, it’s the most visible part of your site on a search results page.
Top of Funnel Marketing (TOFU)
No, not the food. TOFU is the start of the marketing journey. This stage is all about broad audiences and wide awareness. This is when people find out that there’s a new brand or product out there.
Tracking Codes
A small bit of source code meant to help websites track how many users are visiting and what they’re doing on the site.
U
Underdelivery
If you don’t quite meet a goal for the month, you’ve underdelivered. Oops. Better luck next time.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
www.[insert name here].com
We’ve all seen and typed that before. It’s the location of a site on the Internet.
Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
“You should get this because we’re the only sustainable company in this industry.”
Sometimes, you just have to tell it to them straight. A UVP tells a customer exactly why they should buy your product.
User Interface (UI)
The screen of your computer. Your keyboard. Your mouse. The menu of a website. Where human and machine meet for interaction. That’s what UI is.
User Experience (UX)
If UI is the where, UX is the how. How does a customer interact with the product, site, or brand from start to finish?
UTM Tracking Code
You add this at the end of your URL so you can track things like traffic sources, keywords, campaigns, and more.
W
Webinars
A seminar that’s given via the web. They’re usually informative.
Website Analytics
Kind of like social media metrics, website analytics cover all tracked user behavior. Where they found the site, how long they stayed, what parts they went to, how they clicked through, all of that data is part of it.
Web Browser
Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.
Software that gives you access to the Internet.
Web Design
The careful process of putting together a website with all its pages, buttons, and posts. It also includes designing the site for mobile and tablet.
Web Hosting
A web host is a provider that sells space on their servers to store a website. You need a web host if you want your site on the Internet.
Website Usability
Not to be confused with UX, usability focuses only on how easy a product is to use or learn.
White Hat Marketing
Using marketing techniques that Glinda the Good Witch would approve of. There’s no shady business here.
White Paper
An in-depth, informational paper on a specific topic. These are used to promote a product, educate, or present government policy and legislation.
Wireframe
The skeleton of a website sketched out while planning its design. Think of it like your English essay outline or first draft.
X
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
XML is a relative of HTML. It organizes information using tags, so a computer can read and understand it. Think of it like a recipe book. A computer can use XML to find the information it needs, just like the cook looks at the recipe to see which ingredients they need.
XML Sitemap
A file that holds a list of the pages, posts, etc. on a website. If you’ve ever exported a website, it’ll appear in your computer as an XML file.
Y
YouTube
YouTube is the most popular video sharing platform on the Internet. It’s also an advertising platform for marketers and businesses.
