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Marketing terminology by Matt Ottewill (March 2014)

Digital marketing professionals and online systems use a number of marketing specific terms and phrases. It is useful to know the most common ones.

Analytics - the processes and technologies for measuring a campaigns success. Analytics are presented in online Dashboards, and show statistics (such as open and click-through rates) and reports on activity related on a traffic and clicks on a website and ads, email open and click rates, and new subscribers and followers.

Ad-server - an advertising network that serves display ads (banners etc) to partner websites

Bounce rate - the percentage of visitors to a site who leave quickly having only briefly viewed one page (usually the home page)

Call to action (CTA) - a marketing device which seeks to progress a customer or lead through the sales channel. A call to action encourages a lead to do something, voice their view, enter a competition, join a forum etc

Channel - a marketing process (such as email marketing or display advertising) or a specific technology such as a Facebook profile or YouTube channel

CMS - content management system - a back end system that manages, organises and publishes content - eg WordPress, a forum, a blog etc

Conversion rate - the percentage of visitors who having clicked on a display ad, progress to buying a product or service

CPC (cost per click) - the average cost of each click on a display ad

CPA (cost per acquisition) - essentially this figure lets you know what the average cost has been for each sale, by subtracting the cost of a campaign from the total value of sales achieved

CRM - customer relationship management - a system for managing, automating, and organising communications and sales activities with leads or customers

CTR (click through rate) - percentage of visitors to a page (page impressions) on which an call to action (link) is located, who clicked the link

Dashboard - the interface for an online analytics and reporting system, or the management/administration of a web page or channel

Editorial calender - a schedule of repeating marketing activities, such as a weekly blog-post, site update or email campaign

Form submit - statistical tracking data generated whenever a (web) form (such as an emailing list subscription) is completed and submitted

Interruption marketing - in it's worse form, an unwanted sales phone call - other forms include: TV commercials, junk mail, spam mail, display advertising (screen and print), and our pet hate .. DVD trailers that precede a film and you can't fast forward through

Lead - a visitor who is not yet a customer

Keywords - words that identify or describe a product, service, website or some content - important for search (SEO and SEM) and meta data

Keyword phrases - phrases that identify or describe a product, service, website or some content - important for search (SEO and SEM) and meta data

Meta-data - unseen data that helps system identify and understand some content such as a web-page

Metrics - devices for measuring success

New unique visitor - a new visitor, follower or lead

Organic search - unpaid search results predicated on relevance to a search term, popularity, and authenticity

Page impression - when a web page is viewed

Page impressions (views or visits) - the total number of times a web-page has been visited

Page ranking - Google's name for the processes of evaluating a web page's content relevance to specific search terms (keywords and keyword phrases

Permission marketing - marketing activity which a lead or customer has agreed to

PPC (pay per click) - term usually used to refer to Google’s AdWord service

PPL (pay per lead) - the average cost of each new lead

Retention - keeping a visitors attention - retaining a customer

ROI - return on investment

Sales funnel - the complete sales process from lead to sale

Search term - words or phrases entered into a search engines search box

SEM - search engine marketing - see pay per click

SEO - search engine optimisation - the process of optimising web sites and content to improve page ranking

Site-map - a list of website urls with their modification dates used to speed up indexing by a search engine - a page which lists and contains links to all the pages in a site

Unique visitor - an individual who visits a website (they may visit multiple times)

URL - uniform resource locator - a website address (eg www.planetoftunes.com)

Visitors - a website user who is as yet unknown

Followers - a social media term to denote a subscriber

Subscribers - a visitor who has submitted their details (usually name and email address) to a website - YouTube calls Followers Subscribers

Visit time - how long the page or video was viewed