Digital Marketing unsurprisingly never stops evolving, and this is especially true when it comes to jargon. Marketers love making up new words and so do basically everyone who works in digital. This combo has left digital marketing right at the forefront of the talking nonsense wars. Our never ending quest here at The Online Advertising Guide is to help you to keep on top of it.
Personally, I don’t like obsessing over new terms however. A lot of them frankly don’t mean a lot yet and they might quickly fade into oblivion (such as LEAN – we were really rooting for that one). Instead I thought it would be helpful to go over some basics.
These terms have all been around for quite a while, but for one reason or another you might not have fully grasped them yet. It’s like when you’re reading a book and a complicated name comes up. You might take a moment to pronounce it properly in your head, but you might just accept that you don’t know it and fudge it internally.
It’s the same with digital marketing – terms come up and you often either grasp it quickly, or just live with only partially getting it. To that end, I’ve tried to pick words which are especially relevant at the moment, or which are growing in relevance.
So read the below and bone up on what you might not know.
1) Abandoned Cart: When someone adds an item to their shopping cart on a website, but then doesn’t complete their purchase.
Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics
2) Accelerated Delivery: In ad platforms this is an option to specify that ads should be delivered as soon as possible regardless of the schedule. For example a campaign scheduled for a week with a £1,000 budget could deliver in a single day if this option was chosen.
Most useful for: Display Advertising
3) Ad Extensions: In Google Ads, Ad Extensions are extra bits that can be added onto search ads. These include phone numbers, addresses, further site links, calls to action and more. It is highly recommended that these are used as they can massively increase the likelihood of ads being clicked on.
Most useful for: Paid Search
4) Amazon: The largest online retailer in the world. Amazon started out selling books, and now sells pretty much anything.
Most useful for: eCommerce
5) Apple Maps: The (widely mocked) mapping website from Apple. It has 11% of the maps market share, so shouldn’t be ignored.
Most useful for: SEO
6) Apple Maps Connect: How businesses with physical locations get their businesses on Apple Maps. (Find it here)
Most useful for: SEO
7) Bing Maps: Bing Maps is the mapping website from Bing (Bing is the search engine from Microsoft with 9% of global search market share).
Most useful for: SEO
8) Bing Places: Bing Places is how businesses with physical locations get their businesses on Bing Maps. (Find it here)
Most useful for: SEO
9) Breadcrumbs: A hierarchical way of describing to a user where they are on the site (usually with hyperlinks). For example theonlineadvertisingguide > glossary > SEO would tell you that you are in the SEO section in the glossary on The Online Advertising Guide.
Most useful for: SEO, Web Design
This is what the breadcrumbs for this page look like.
10) Broad Match: When targeting keywords in Google Ads for paid search, broad match means inputting the keywords without anything around them (eg free soap). By doing this, not only is the keyword itself targeted in Google Search (eg free soap), but so is the keyword when it is used in a sentence (eg where can i find free soap), as well as searches which are very close to the keyword (eg free soaping for my dog).
Search terms targeted by broad match keywords don’t need to include every word that was input (eg searches for free or soap would also come up).
Most useful for: Paid Search
11) Broad Match Modifier: When targeting keywords in Google Ads for paid search, broad match modified means inputting the keywords with a plus sign in front of them (eg free +soap). By doing this the same rules apply as for broad match keywords with the addition that the word(s) with the + in front of it (or a close variation) must be included in the targeted search term.
Most useful for: Paid Search
12) Buy-To-Detail Rate: A metric in Google Analytics when using the enhanced eCommerce module which shows the percentage of people who bought an item on a website, after viewing that product’s page. This can be a vital metric in determining how effective a product page is.
Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics
13) Canonical Link: A link added to the meta data of a pages code which indicates what the ‘main’ version of that page is, in order to focus link equity on one page and to stop duplicate content penalties. For example if a website sells shoes and uses lots of different ways to categorise them, then the exact same page might appear multiple times on a site – eg mens Reebok trainers could appear in the category for mens shoes, Reeboks, and trainers.
When this happens it is best practise to designate one version on the page as the canonical version (which is the version which will appear in search results), and to add a canonical link tag stating this to all versions of the page.
Most useful for: SEO
14) Cart-To-Detail Rate: A metric in Google Analytics when using the enhanced eCommerce module which shows the percentage of people who put an item in their shopping cart on a website, after viewing that product’s page. This can be useful in determining how effective a product page is.
Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics
15) Chat Bot: A chat bot can be used on any platform, but they are still rising in prevalence on social media. They are a simple form of AI that can be used to answer simple questions from customers on instant messenger platforms (eg what are your opening hours).
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Web Design
16) Contextual advertising: Advertising based on what is on the page the ad is displayed on. This type of advertising can be very effective and has the added bonus of not requiring any cookies being dropped on a users computer.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, Display Advertising
17) COPE: COPE is an acronym that stands for Create Once, Publish Everywhere. It is a strategy to increase the value of content creation by focusing on distributing that content in many different forms.
For example if the content created is a great infographic, a blog post could be made explaining it, it could be posted on social media, it could be sent to an email list, and even have the content turned into a video version. By focusing on multi-channel distribution, this can massively increase the value of creating new content.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, Content Marketing
18) CPCV: Cost Per Completed View. This is a metric used for video advertising. It is not that common as usually a video ad is used to encourage people to take a further action, rather than simply get people to watch the whole video. However if watching the complete video is the goal of the video ad, this is the appropriate metric/payment model to use.
Most useful for: Display Advertising
19) Cross-Device Conversions: A way of measuring when someone visits a website on one device, but then only completes a conversion (such as a sale) when on another device. This is useful as many people will research products using a phone of tablet, but then make a purchase on a desktop computer.
Most useful for: Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation
20) CTOR: Click to Open Rate. The percent of people who clicked on an email, out of everyone who received and opened it.
Most useful for: Email Marketing, Analytics
21) Demand Generation: A type of marketing that focuses on increasing demand for a product or service, rather than marketing the product or service directly. For example an email newsletter about the joy of a well-maintained car would increase the demand for tune-ups at car garages.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, Email Marketing
22) Direct Mail: A type of marketing where a letter or email is sent with a specific ask attached. For example a charity sending a letter explaining how it needs funds for a project.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, Email Marketing
23) Discord: A chatroom app, often described as a social media platform.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
24) Disqus: A commenting plugin that can be used on any website which requires users to create profiles, often described as a social media platform.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Web Design
25) Double Opt-In: The process of asking people to confirm an email subscription (ie a user signs up to a newsletter on a website, then receives an email requesting that they confirm their email address in order to actually subscribe). While some consider this best practise it’s actually mostly considered unnecessary and annoying, and can drive email sign-ups down significantly.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
26) eCommerce: The business of selling things online. An eCommerce site is any website that sells things.
Most useful for: Type of Advertising, eCommerce
27) eCommerce Conversion Rate: A conversion rate just for eCommerce transactions. It can be useful for websites with both eCommerce and other goals to measure eCommerce conversion rates separately so that they can ensure they are earning enough money.
Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation
28) ECPC: In Google Ads ECPC stands for Enhanced Cost Per Click, and is a setting where clicks are targeted, but clicks that are likely to gain conversions are given priority. It is a kind of halfway option between CPC and CPA advertising.
Most useful for: Paid Search
29) eCPE: Effective Cost Per Engagement. This term is used when a cost per engagement is being calculated for anything where an engagement was not directly paid for. It helps to compare CPE and non-CPE campaigns effectiveness, when engagements were the goal.
Most useful for: Analytics, Social Media Marketing
30) Email List : Often referred to as an Email Marketing List. A list of email addresses that a company keeps that they email for one reason or another. Since the introduction of GDPR, when collecting email addresses from Europeans you need to get explicit consent for what that email is to be used for. This means that you may not ask for an email address in order to confirm a sale, but then sell that email address onto other companies UNLESS the user has opted-in allowing that to happen.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
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31) EPMV: Earning Per Thousand Visitors. A metric that captures the value of each visit to a site rather than the value of each page or ad. The intention is to show that more page views per visitor equals more ad revenue overall than simply gaining clicks on ads immediately.
Most useful for: Analytics, Display Advertising
32) Even Delivery: In ad platforms this is an option to specify that ads should be delivered evenly as possible throughout the set date range. For example a campaign scheduled for a week with a £1,400 budget should deliver £200 maximum each day (although +/- 10% is often acceptable).
Most useful for: Display Advertising
33) Exact Match: When targeting keywords in Google Ads for paid search, exact match means inputting the keywords with square brackets around them (eg [free soap]). By doing this, only that exact keyword is targeted in search engines (eg free soap).
Note: Google have actually relaxed the rules around exact match recently, so miss-spellings and ‘near’ matches are also targeted (eg free saop or free soaps).
Most useful for: Paid Search
34) Exit Rate: Exit Rate is the percentage of users who left a website after visiting a specific webpage. It is distinct from bounce rate, which only takes into account people who entered on a webpage (and did nothing trackable) and then left – exit rate includes all people who left from a page.
Most useful for: Analytics
35) First Time Impression Ratio: This is a metric used on Facebook Ads which shows the percentage of impressions which were from people seeing an ad for the first time that day. This is essentially an odd way of measuring reach as it re-counts users each day, and then expresses that as a percentage of all ad impressions.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Analytics
36) Google Ads: The new name for Google AdWords introduced in 2018. As Google Ads covers more than simply text ads on Google Search, it made sense to update the name to be more inclusive.
Most useful for: Paid Search, Display Advertising
37) Google Data Studio: A free WYSIWYG report builder that links with Google Analytics and other analytics platforms.
Most useful for: Analytics
38) Google Search Console: The new name for Google Webmaster Tools. Google Search Console is a free service which lets website owners understand their performance within Google Search by providing a number of useful metrics and tools.
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing, Analytics
39) Google Trends: A free tool from Google which lets people explore the relative popularity of different search terms on Google Search. Incredibly useful for SEO research.
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing, Analytics
40) Google Webmaster Tools: The old name for Google Search Console.
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing, Analytics
41) Growth Hacking: A type of marketing focused solely on finding strategies for growth.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising
42) Hard Bounce: When an email is rejected by an email client. This mainly happens because an email address is invalid, or because the email sender has already been marked as spam.
Most useful for: Email Marketing, Analytics
43) Header Bidding: A type of real time bidding where publishers offer each ad impression to multiple ad exchanges at the same time (via code in the header of the page), and then chose which one to accept based on the bids received. Header Bidding is an attempt to increase the efficiency of ad serving by reducing the load time of ads.
Most useful for: Display Advertising
44) Impr. Share: Impression Share is a metric in Google Ads. It is the percentage of impressions that your ads received in paid search out of the total amount they were eligible to receive. A low impression share likely means that either your ads aren’t good enough, or that another advertiser is out-bidding you (or both).
Most useful for: Paid Search
45) Influencer: A person who is popular on social media and is thought to have influence over their followers. 10,000 followers is generally the minimum to be thought of as an influencer.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing
46) Influencer Marketing: Using influencers to market a product or brand. This can be directly via paying an influencer (eg for a sponsored post) or indirectly by marketing to influencers in the hopes that they like your product and tell more people about it.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, Influencer Marketing, Social Media Marketing
47) Keywords Everywhere: A free plugin for Google Chrome which provides keyword volume and CPC data on websites like Google Search, Amazon, and YouTube.
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing, Analytics
48) Knowledge Graph: A knowledge base created and used by Google to serve information directly into search results. These can come up as text answers from web pages above search results (with the source link below) or in the right hand column with a set of useful information drawn from multiple sources including Google Maps.
Most useful for: SEO
49) Landing page: The page a user enters a website on. Specific landing pages are often built for specific advertising campaigns, so that the messaging on both match up more closely that with the generic landing page. Having a bespoke landing page generally improves performance.
Most useful for: Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Display Advertising, Email Marketing, Paid Search
50) Last Click: Sometimes referred to as Last Touch, this is the most common type of attribution for conversions. For Last Click conversions, the final click a user makes before a conversion is considered as the sole thing that drove that conversion.
For example, a user might click on a social media post, then a referral link, then a paid search ad before making a purchase on a website. With last click attribution, the results of that sale would be attributed to the paid search ad only.
Most useful for: Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation
51) Latency: The time between a user action (such as a click) and the corresponding reaction on a webpage (such as a new webpage starting to load).
Most useful for: Analytics
52) Lazy loading: In display advertising, lazy loading refers to not loading an ad until it is set to appear on a page (eg if it is 50% down a long webpage, then it would only load when a user gets 40% down the webpage). The idea is to minimise unnecessary computing resources used by the advertiser, ad network, website, and user.
Most useful for: Display Advertising, Web Design
53) Life-Time Value: LTV (often called Customer Life-Time Value or CLTV) is an attempt at predicting the amount of profit that can be expected over the entire relationship with a user. The “life-time” in this metric does not refer to the lifespan of a human, rather the full length of time that a person interacts with a business. For example if people were only expected to visit a website twice, then their LTV would only be calculated based on what people spend on the site during two visits.
Most useful for: Analytics
54) Link Equity: Also referred to as Link Juice, this is an informal way of describing how much a link affects a web pages rankings on a search engine results page. Link Equity is also used when discussing redirecting one page to another, or the use of canonical links.
For example “setting Page A as the canonical link for these pages will transfer all their link equity to it” – meaning that Page A will get a boost on SERPs.
Most useful for: SEO
55) Link Label: Also referred to as Anchor Text, this is the text that actually goes on a hyperlink (eg in the html of a page <a href=”http://example.com”>THIS TEXT</a>.
Most useful for: SEO, Web Design
56) Local Citation: Any mention of a businesses address online. These are vital for local SEO.
Most useful for: SEO
57) Local Influencer: An influencer who’s followers are concentrated in one geographic area.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing
58) Local Pack: Also referred to as a Snack Pack. The section on search engine results page related to a specific location. For example if you search for “dentists near me” then there will generally be a section on the search engine results page that is taken from Google Maps, showing the nearest dentists.
Most useful for: SEO
59) Local SEO: The process of making a webpage or website more visible on search engine results pages due it’s location. This often means putting information on mapping websites and local directories.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, SEO
60) Long Tail Keywords: Keywords which have low search volumes (often due to their specificity), which can be good targets for smaller businesses.
For example top refrigerator brands would want to compete over the keyword “buy refrigerators”, and although that keyword will be have a high volume the combined advertising spend of the top refrigerator companies would make it too expensive for smaller refrigerator manufacturers. Therefore a Scotland based refrigerator might bid highly on the phrase “Buy Refrigerators in Edinburgh”, which would have less overall volume, but as it is more relevant to the Scottish fridge company would be an easier win for them.
By doing well on lots of long tail keywords, smaller companies are able to find markets less-dominated by larger companies.
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing
61) Meta Tag: A tag which is used to define what something online is about. While there is still an html meta tag that can be used for this on websites, due to it’s widespread misuse search engines no longer use them to rank websites. Similar types of tags to this are still used internally on websites however, and on many platforms they are still used to categorise content (most notably YouTube).
Most useful for: SEO, Social Media Marketing
62) Micro-influencer: An influential person on social media with less than 10,000 followers. Often thought to be more influential than their more-followed counterparts as they can interact directly with more of their followers.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing
63) Moderator: Someone who reads comments or posts on a website and decides whether or not that content is allowed. Moderators can be paid or be volunteers, and are often also used as community managers.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
64) Monthly Active Users: A metric social networks use to describe how many people are using their site. The point of this metric is that it only takes into account people who are using the site in any given month, rather than people who have opened an account but never visit the site.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Analytics
65) Multi-Touch: Sometimes referred to as multi-channel, this is way of attributing conversions across multiple channels.
For example if a person clicks on a social media ad, then a link in an email, then a display ad before making a sale, then each of these three channels would receive some credit for the sale. The amount of credit each channel receives must still be decided upon however, as there is no standard methodology as of yet.
Most useful for: Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation
66) Negative Keyword Targeting: Keywords where ads won’t appear. For example if the keyword “Airplane” was targeted by a Airline, then they should also negatively target the word “crash” so that when people search for the term “Airplane Crash” their ads won’t come up.
Most useful for: Paid Search, Display Advertising
67) Open Rate: The percentage of people who opened an email (out of all the people who the email was successfully delivered to).
Most useful for: Email Marketing, Analytics
68) Opt-In: In email marketing an opt-in means ticking a box which says “I would like to receive this email” as opposed to unticking a pre-ticked box, or having to tick a box which says “I would not like to receive this email”.
Due to GDPR, opt-ins are the only legal way to collect email addresses of any European citizen in order to email them later.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
69) Opt-Out: In email marketing an opt-out means unticking a pre-ticked box which says “I would like to receive this email” or having to tick a box which says “I would not like to receive this email”. This is as opposed to ticking a box which says “I would like to receive this email”.
Due to GDPR, opt-outs are not a legal way to collect email addresses of any European citizen in order to email them later.
Opt-out can also be used to refer to withdrawing permission to be emailed.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
70) Organic Search: Non-paid-for traffic which comes to a website from a search engine.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, SEO, Analytics
71) PageRank: The algorithm used by Google to decide where web pages should appear on search engine results pages.
Most useful for: SEO
72) Paid Social: Traffic which comes to a website from advertising on social networks. This term usually only applies to ads which appear in social networks feeds, rather than display ads which appear alongside some social networks.
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Analytics
73) Phrase Match: When targeting keywords in Google Ads for paid search, phrase match means inputting the keywords with quotation marks around them (eg “free soap”). By doing this, not only is the keyword itself targeted in Google Search (eg free soap), but if the keyword appears in a sentence then it is still targeted (eg where can I find free soap near me?).
The only rule for phrase match is that the words within the quotation marks have to appear in the specified order.
Most useful for: Paid Search
74) Podcast: A downloadable audio show.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing
75) Podcaster: Someone who makes podcasts.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing
76) Polite Loading: In display advertising, polite loading refers to not loading all of an ad right away when the webpage it is on loads. For example in Google Ads this means that a placeholder image loads until the webpage content has loaded, and then the rich media version of the ad loads once the webpage is complete.
This can be beneficial to advertisers as well as users, as it means that ads aren’t loaded on pages which users navigate away from quickly.
Most useful for: Display Advertising, Web Design
77) Post Moderation: When all comments or posts on a site from any users go live as soon as a user presses submit, but may be checked and removed later by a moderator.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
78) Pre-Moderation: When all comments or posts on a site are checked by moderators once submitted, before being set live (or not) by the moderator.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
79) Press Release: A statement sent out to the press explaining some new development. Usually used in order to help/encourage the press to report on something.
For example if Sony released a new type of TV, they would send out a press release explaining what was new about it, so that reporters could get the details right (and also so that Sony could control the story somewhat).
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, SEO, Content Marketing
80) Product List: A place where products are listed such as in search results, category pages, sales pages etc. Examining the performance of product lists can be an incredibly effective way of boosting sales.
For example if an item has a very high CTR on a product list, but is quite far down the list then if might make sense to move it higher up, as the more people who see that product the more people who are likely to click on it.
Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics
81) Programmatic: Display advertising where an algorithm is used to decide which ads are placed in which positions (using a real-time bidding model).
For example an advertiser might set a maximum bid of $2 per click and target any site to do with fishing. Then whenever fishing web pages are loaded, the RTB program then decides which ads are loaded based on their bids (and likelihood of being clicked on).
Most useful for: Display Advertising
82) Quora: A social network based around finding answers to questions. The site tries to encourage expert answers on subjects by notifying users who are experts in an area when a question comes up that they could answer. Answers are up and down voted by users of the social network in order to surface the best answers.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
83) Rank Brain: A machine learning algorithm used by Google to improve search results.
Most useful for: SEO
84) Reddit: A social network in the form of a forum. Reddit considers itself “the front page of the internet”. It is made up of sub-forums (called sub-reddits), each of which moderates itself. Comments are upvoted and downvoted to indicate whether they are considered good or bad.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
85) Referral Traffic: Traffic to one website from a link on another website (not including search or social media sites, or ads).
Most useful for: Types of Advertising, Content Marketing, Analytics
86) Role-Based Address: An email address which relates to a job rather than to an individual (such as editor@theonlineadvertisingguide.com). As emails to such addresses are often for B2B purposes, the laws around emailing role-based email addresses are slightly more relaxed than to individual email addresses. This is because there is more of a case to be made for a legitimate interest exemption to GDPR.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
87) SERPs Domination: SERPs Domination is when a single website is returned for all the results on the first page for a single search.
Most useful for: SEO
88) Slack: An instant messenger tool used by companies, sometimes referred to as a social network.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
89) SnapChat: A social network based around sending temporary messages. With lots of fun filters and features SnapChat was briefly very popular.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
90) Social Proof: A way of expressing that people like/agree with an action, often by using usage stats. For example “Why not join our newsletter list. 5,624 people already have!”. Social Proof can be very effective at getting people to do something.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Web Design
91) Structured Citation: A business listing on a directory.
Most useful for: SEO
92) Third-Party Cookies: Cookies which are dropped onto a persons computer when visiting a website which are not from the website itself. For example cookies from an ad on the website they are visiting.
Most useful for: Analytics
93) Twitch: A streaming social network type service, where users film themselves playing video games and interact with people who are watching them. Many vloggers start here.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
94) Unsub Rate: The percentage of people who unsubscribed from an email out of all the people it was successfully delivered to.
Most useful for: Email Marketing, Analytics
95) Viral: A piece of content that is shared a lot by individuals (without payment) in a short period of time. Viral marketing is the attempt to create pieces of content which work like this, in order to get a lot of reach for marketing messages at a low cost.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing
96) Vlog: A video blog.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing
97) Vlogger: A video blogger.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing
98) Welcome Email: An initial email to someone who has joined any type of email list (eg because they’ve signed up to a newsletter), often containing useful related content. Welcome emails are generally very effective as they come just after someone has signed up and are most interested in what the sender has to say.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
99) WhatsApp: A secure instant messenger owned by Facebook. Groups can be made within WhatsApp to communicate to lots of people simultaneously, which has led to some people referring to WhatsApp as a social network.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
100) Yammer: Microsoft’s answer to Twitter & Slack. Generally used internally on companies intranet for staff to communicate with each other.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
Phew. I can’t believe you read all of that. I hope it helps. What are your top digital marketing terms for this year? Do you think I missed anything vital? If so feel free to pester us on Twitter.