Glossary:

The most commonly used terms in online marketing.

A/B tests: Are tests where two different versions of the same thing are tested and measured for effectiveness. In the world of digital marketing, the “thing” being tested is often a web page, social media campaign, email campaign, digital advertisement, or sign-up form. To effectively A/B test, digital marketers need to control for all variables except the one they’re testing, look to avoid bias in the way the test is delivered, and capture a large enough sample size.

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Bounce Rate: When someone visits your website, you want them to visit more than just your homepage, and to stay there as long as possible.  When someone visits your home page and immediately leaves your website, they’re said to have “bounced.” The percentage of total site visitors who leave after visiting just one page (it could be the homepage or another page you’ve directed them to) is known as your bounce rate. Of course, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.

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Call-to-action:  When you post a digital ad on your website or another site, there’s a specific action you want people to take.  It could be to download content, for example. To motivate people to take that action, you typically give them a good reason for doing so and include a button with language like, “Click here to learn more.”  That button and the words within it are your call-to-action.

 

Clickthrough rate (CTR) : Is the percentage of clicks a campaign receives relative to the number of impressions. A higher CTR often implies that campaigns are resonating more effectively with viewers. The formula for CTR is:

(clicks on a campaign ÷ total campaign impressions) × 100 = CTR

For example, if a given ad campaign has 5 clicks and 500 impressions, the CTR is 1%: (5 ÷ 500) × 100 = 1.

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Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of customers, or potential customers, that take a specific action. The “specific action” can be anything from opening an email, to signing up for a demo, to making a purchase.

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Content Marketing: Consumers are more skeptical than they used to be, largely because they’ve been bombarded with TV ads, direct mail pieces and calls from telemarketers for years. You need to respond to skepticism by building trust before you talk sales. They do this by sending prospective customers content (through emails, website blogs and social media posts) that gives them useful information. This process is referred to as content marketing.

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Cost Per Click (CPC):  When you enter words into Google, you’ll see sponsored ads at the top and right of the page. The advertisers who placed those ads there only pay if someone clicks on one of their ads. How much they pay—referred to as cost per click—depends on several factors, like how valuable their products are and how competitive those terms are.

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Customer segmentation: Also known as market segmentation, is the process of categorising and segmenting customers based on different criteria. The objective of customer segmentation is to enable you to group customers based upon their needs, interests, and budget as well as their potential value to your business. By properly segmenting your customer contact information, you can send more targeted and useful information that your customers are more likely to find compelling. 

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Demographic: A way to segment your audience or target audience, through gender, age, income, social class, and so on. Demographics are usually the first step of creating a buyer persona or establishing your audience.

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Engagement – This is the amount of interest a post receives . Engagements can be anything from likes, to comments, to shares. They show how many people are connecting with your brand and how they are actually digesting your content.

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Impression: An impression is an instance of a piece of online content being shown. Often, the term is used in the world of paid online ads. For example, clickthrough rate (CTR) is calculated using clicks and impressions.

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Keywords:  These are the words that people enter into search engines to find whatever it is they’re looking for. To increase the odds that consumers will find them on the internet, companies do research to discover what those words are as they relate to their business.  For example, if you sell furniture in Newcastle, NSW, your top keywords might be things like, “buy new furniture Newcastle.”

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Landing Page: The specific web page a visitor gets when they click on your ad. Landing pages should be optimised to ensure a web visitor is likely to convert. They should always reflect what you have advertised to get the person to click in the first place.

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Marketing analytics: And digital marketing go hand in hand. Marketing analytics is a data-driven approach to the measurement of marketing effectiveness. With the data marketers can capture from social media, web forms, and other mediums, marketing analytics can enable insights that make future campaigns more effective.

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Metadata: Data that tells search engines what your website is about like title tags, meta descriptions, the header tags etc.

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Open Rate: The open rate is the number of emails opened compared with the number sent. In other words, if you send a campaign to a list of 100 addresses, and 22 emails were opened, you’d have a 22% open rate. This doesn’t necessarily mean the email was read, but that it was opened. Check the CTR as compared to the open rate to drive true insights.

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Organic Traffic:  As noted above, when people enter keywords into search engines, they’ll see sponsored (paid) ads on the right and at the top of the page. The rest of the results on the page are “organic,” meaning that it doesn’t cost your business anything when someone clicks on those links. The traffic that goes to your website from clicking on these organic results is organic traffic.

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Paid Traffic: This the traffic that comes to your website as a result of people clicking on an ad you pay search engines to run for you.

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Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: If you decide to run sponsored ads on search engines, you need to find the best keywords for your business and enter them into Google AdWords (or another search engine’s PPC marketing platform). The process of working with search engines to run the most effective paid ad campaigns for your business is known as pay-per-click advertising.

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Return on investment (ROI): Is the percentage of return made on a given investment. While there are plenty of marketing-specific metrics you’ll come across as you work through the marketing process, it’s important not to overlook the fundamentals, such as ROI.

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):  The process of making your website more search-engine friendly and achieving higher results in search engines, is known as search engine optimisation, or SEO.