Digital Marketing Glossary

A ¹

• Analytics

  The collection and processing of data that can help indicate effectiveness of campaigns, or provide insights into your audiences.

B ¹

• Backlinking

  Also known as inbound or incoming links, backlinks are simply the linking to one website from another. For example, a product review on a specialist blog might backlink to the manufacturers website. Backlinking shows a degree of confidence in a website, and helps with SEO.

C ²

• Campaign

  A series of adverts and messages that share a common idea or theme. You might for instance run multiple adverts for a particular service or product. They might look different or target different audiences, but they are all in service of the same idea.

• Conversion

  The point at which a recipient of a marketing message completes a desired goal. This might be signing up for a newsletter, or completing a check-out, or reaching out to your team.

D ²

• Dashboard

  A unified overview of your analytics data. This might include website traffic, breakdown of audience metrics, or performance data on particular adverts and campaigns.

• Digital Advertising

  The use of digital channels such as social media, display networks and search engines to promote a product or service.

E ²

• Email Marketing

  Sending direct messages and targeted material to an audience in the hopes of developing or extending a commercial relationship and drive conversions.

• eXtensible Markup Language Sitemap (XML)

  This is a file that lists all of the URLs on your website, making it easier for web-crawlers to index your website. This is one of the technical improvements you can make to increase the performance of your website in search engines.

F ¹

• Funnel

  A representation of the user journey from first discovering your product or service to the purchasing or utilising stage.

G ¹

• Google Ads (formerly AdWords)

  Google’s advertising network, which spans across text ads, display ads and video ads. These can appear in Search, on YouTube, Discover, and more.

H ¹

• Hybrid Marketing

  A marketing strategy that utilises both digital and traditional marketing channels to reach a larger audience.

I ¹

• Influencer Marketing

  Collaborating with big social media personalities to promote your product or service to their followers.

J ¹

• Jargon

  The subject of this article, jargon is the specialised language used to refer to technical marketing terms.

K ¹

• Keywords

  A word or a group of words that a user would type into a search engine when looking for information. A website with good copy will contain many important – relevant – keywords which will help that website appear in the search results.

L ¹

• Listening Activity

  The monitoring of social media for mentions to your brand, your competitors, and any related keywords. This can help assess your relative brand recognition, and trends in your industry.

M ²

• Market Research

  Collecting and analysing data about the market, the customers, and the competition. This is then compiled into a report that is used to make operational decisions.

• Marketing Mix

  The four elements, or levers, that marketers can use to influence the demand of a product or service. These are product, price, place, and promotion. (Also know as the 4 P's...of which there are derivatives.)

N ¹

• Native Advertising

  Content on an online publication or channel that has the look and feel of normal media, but is paid for by an advertiser. You might be familiar with the term ‘advertorial’, or seen popular YouTube channels create paid-for content on a particular product.

O ²

• Optimisation

  Making adjustments to your marketing strategy based on gathered data to better achieve your marketing objectives. This could be refinements to an existing strategy, or a more radical overhaul if your initial implementation isn’t providing the results you want.

• Organic Traffic

  Traffic that reaches your website through non-paid for means. This could be through word-of-mouth referrals (or, more commonly, via social media) or through finding your website through a search engine.

P ¹

• Pay-per-click (PPC)

  Ad advertising model commonly used in search engines and social media where an advertiser only pays when a user clicks on their ad.

Q ³

• Qualified traffic

  Qualified traffic refers to people that visit your website who have a genuine possibility - or high likelihood - of buying your product or service. It differs from general traffic who might just browse your website as QT consists of people who make purchasing decisions when entering the site.

• Quality score

  This is a diagnostic tool in a number of ad platforms that give you an idea of the quality of your ads compared to other advertisers. They take into account both the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads.

• Quick wins

  These are often low/no cost changes, and can be a great opportunity to empower your marketing teams to try new things.

R ²

• Retargeting ads

  Have you ever spent time researching a product, only to then have that product advertised to you across the web? That is retargeting – it’s targeted advertisement to users who have engaged with a website or brand to keep the brand in their mind.

• Return on Investment (ROI)

  Simply put, this is how much money you make that can be directly attributed to the marketing budget you allocated. A higher ROI is better, as it means you generated significantly more revenue than you spent.

S ²

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

  The process of optimising your website so it appears higher on search engine result pages. This is done through a mix of on-page (eg. copy that includes high performing, relevant keywords) and off-page (eg. backlinks) optimisation. There are also technical improvements you can make to your site to perform better on search engines, such as having good mobile support, improving page speed, fixing site errors and creating a site-map.

• SERP

  Search Engine Results Pages. This is the page you see after typing your query into a search engine, such as Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go.

T ²

• Testimonials

  Testimonials are reviews written by satisfied customers about how much they love your product or service. They’re really useful for creating trust with potential customers and improving brand credibility.

• Thought leadership

  The process of demonstrating your expertise and authority by providing insights into your industry. This can be done through a number of channels, including blogs, white papers, or speaking engagements. This helps increase brand awareness and can support your marketing through backlinks if the content is hosted on other platforms.

U ¹

• User experience

  The user experience focuses on the usability, accessibility and satisfaction a user has when interacting with your website or digital product. This can be dictated by the user interface (UI), which dictates the human/digital interaction. A clean, easy-to-use interface will likely provide a better UX when compared to one that’s overly busy and unintuitive.

V ²

• Vertical segmentation

  Segmentation is a marketing technique to target specific types of audiences in the marketplace. Vertical segmentation is targeting a narrower segment of the audience base, whereas horizontal segmentation means selling to a wide range of consumers. An example of vertical segmentation would be marketing your product to a very niche audience, such as a web development agency that targets the healthcare industry – allowing them to tailor and focus their offering to the specific needs of that industry.

• Viral marketing

  Using social media to spread awareness of a product or message very quickly. They can use shock, humour or surprise to grab attention, or encourage participation – for example, the ice bucket challenge in 2014.

W ¹

• Web crawler

  Often shortened to crawler, or referred to as a spiderbot, this is an internet bot that trawls the web, following hyperlinks in an effort to index web pages. These are commonly deployed by search engines, and the ease with which they can index your website can impact your search rankings.

X ¹

• X - cross-channel marketing

  Different social media channels attract different types of audiences. Cross-channel marketing is the use of multiple marketing channels to provide a cohesive message to reach those different market segments. Multiple channels will be commonly planned for in a marketing campaign.

Y ¹

• YoY

  Year-on-year growth or decline, presented as a percentage. It’s a commonly used metric when assessing performance over a period of time.

Z ²

• Z-score

  A statistical score that is used to measure a company’s performance against that of its peers.

• Zero click search optimisation

  Zero click search results are where an end-user never needs to click on a link from the SERP to get the information they want. This is because they either gleaned the information from effective snippets in the results, or a search engine such as Google have extracted the information and presented it at the top of the search results. Depending on your marketing objectives, this can be useful or detrimental to you, as it can quickly raise awareness, but it can also lead to less traffic coming to your website.