Must-Know Digital Marketing Terms!

This is the extensive list of digital marketing terms, acronyms, lingo, and buzzwords. If you are new to digital marketing, understanding the complex jargon can become a little overwhelming. Below you will find some of the most common digital marketing terms, which are specific to PPC and SEO.

1.      #301 Redirect- is a command redirecting a visitor from one web page to another web page. This type of redirect is to be used for permanent redirect.

2.      #302 Redirect- is a command redirecting a visitor from one web page to another web page used for temporary situations only.

3.      404 Error- this error message appears when a visitor tries to log in to the web page that has already expired or doesn’t exist.

4.      Anchor Text- is a clickable word in the hyperlink.

5.      Algorithm- is a set of rules, that search engine follows in order to rank the websites. Google makes several major updates every year.

6.      Back link- is a hyperlink that links from a web page, back to your web page or website.

7.      Banner Ad- is a popular digital image resource that shows up at the top or side of a web page and when clicked takes the user to the advertiser’s site.

8.      Black Hat SEO- is a practice against search engine guidelines to get site ranking higher in search results. It might be tactics like duplicate content and spammy link building.

9.      Bot- is often referred to as crawler/spider. Search engines like Google use bots to crawl websites and indexes.

10.   Bounce Rate- represents the percentage of visitors who enter the website and leave immediately rather than interacting with any pages.

11.   Bread crumbs- is a site flow or navigation for the visitors to find their way around the website.

12.   Click through rate- CTR is a percentage of people who clicked on the link of your ad. It is calculated as Clicks/ Impressions.

13.   Contact form- a set of questions filled out on the web page by your visitor, that is automatically sent to your email when it is filled out.

14.   Conversion- when a visitor to your website completes a desired goal. Such as filling out a form, email sign up or making a purchase.

15.   Conversion rate- is the percentage of visitors to your website that completes the desired goal. The formula is the total number of conversions/total number of clicks.

16.   CPA- cost per acquisition is a metric to measure how much money is spent in order to acquire a new lead or customer. The formula is Spend / Conversions.

17.   CPC- cost per click- the actual price you pay for each click in your pay per click campaign. Its also known as PPC-Pay Per Click. The formula is Spend / Clicks.

18.   CPM- Cost per mile is also referred to as cost per impressions. It’s the rate that the advertiser has agreed to pay per 1,000 views of a particular ad. It's calculated by a total number of impressions of the ad by 1,000.

19.   CTA- Call to Action- A prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action.

20.   CTR- Click-through Rate- is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who views a page. The formula is Clicks / Impressions.

21.   Display Ads- is a form of online paid advertising through banners. When users click on the banner/image with the brand/ promotion message to then taken to the corresponding landing page.

22.   Display Network- A network of websites and apps that show display ads on their web pages. The Google Display Network reaches 90% of internet users worldwide across millions of websites, news pages, blogs, and Google sites like Gmail and YouTube. Businesses can target consumers on the display network based on keywords, placement on specific web pages and through re marketing.

23.   Do follow- is a descriptor of links describing that search engines crawl them and count them as votes of quality. These forms of links are used by Google to measure page rank.

24.   E-Commerce- Stands for Electronic Commerce. It’s the buying and selling of goods and services or the transmitting of funds or data over the internet.

25.   Email Automation- It is a software that sends emails automatically to the subscribers based on predefined triggers.

26.   Email Marketing- Is the act of sending a business message typically to a group of potential customers using email.

27.   Featured Snippet- is a summarized piece of information that Google pulls from a website to provide users with a concise, direct answer to the question right on the search results page without the users having to click through to a specific result.

28.   Form Fill- The form includes questions that request basic data or more comprehensive and provide the marketer with valuable data. The lead is generated when an individual fills in the required fields to query for more information.

29.   Hashtag- is a phrase beginning with the symbol “#”. It’s a kind of meta tag used in social media networks for tagging content for users to find. It is used for finding users looking for broad topics on social media.

30.   Hyperlink- is an HTML code that creates a link from one web page to another web page. It is usually highlighted word/ image that takes you to the destined location when you click on the highlighted.

31.   Impression- is an ad view. It’s a term that refers to the point in which an ad is viewed once by a visitor or displayed once on a web page.

32.   Impression share- The formula is the number of impressions you have received/the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.

33.   Index- It’s the process of adding web pages into Google search, depending upon which meta tag you used. (Index/No-index). Google will not crawl or add the No-index pages to the web search.

34.   Keywords- are the topics/ phrases that searchers enter into the search engine. Keywords usually define the content.

35.   Landing Page- is a web page created specifically for the purpose of a marketing campaign. Its where a visitor lands when they have clicked on the ad or a link.

36.   LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)- is the method that Google and other search engines use to study and compare relationships between different terms and concepts. These keywords can be used to improve SEO traffic and create more visibility and higher rankings in search results.

37.   Lead- A potential customer in the sales funnel who has communicated with a business with the intent to purchase through a call, email, or online form fill.

38.   Link- is a hyperlink to another web page typically activated by clicking on a highlighted word or image on the screen. Internal links that point to pages on the same site, and external links that point to web pages on a different website.

39.   Long Tail Keywords- are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they're closer to a point-of-purchase.

40.   Metadata- HTML snippets added to a web page's code that add contextual information for web crawlers and search engines. Search engines use metadata to help decide what information from a web page to display in their results. Metadata summarizes basic information about data like published, the page title, author, and image descriptions, which can make finding and work with particular instances of data easier.

41.   Meta Description- is a snippet of up to about 155 characters, it’s a tag in HTML, which summarizes a page's content. Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase is within the description, so optimizing the meta description is crucial for on-page SEO.

42.   Meta Keywords- are a specific type of meta tag that appears in the HTML code of a Web page and help tell search engines what the topic of the page is.

43.   Pay-Per-Click- is also known as cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is commonly associated with search engines like Google Ad Words.

44.   Quality Score- CPC Bid + Ad Rank.

45.   Query- The term given for what a user types and searches using search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

46.   Redirect- A way by which a web browser takes a user from one page to another without the user clicking or making any input. There are various types of redirects like, 301 redirect- which serve different purposes. Typically, this helps improve user experience across a website by helping the user find what they are looking for or avoiding dead ends like 404 (Not Found) error.

47.   Referral- is a medium denoted in Google Analytics that reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine. When someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site. – A medium denoted in Google Analytics that represents a website visit that came from another website.

48.   Re marketing- a type of paid ad that allows advertisers to show ads to customers who have already visited their site. Once a user visits a site, a small piece of data called a “cookie” will be stored in the user’s browser. When the user then visits other sites, this cookie can allow re marketing ads to be shown. Re marketing allows advertisers to “follow” users around in attempts to get the user back to the original site.

49.   Responsive web design- is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and windows or screen sizes.

50.   ROAS- stands for Return on Ad Spend. The formula is Revenue/ Cost.

51.   ROI- stands for Return on Investment. Formula is Revenue- Cost/ Cost X 100.

52.   Schema markup- is a code that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users. Schema markup can help your site display rich snippets in the search results page, making your search result stand out and improve click through rates.

53.   SERP- Search Engine Results Pages are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a searcher.

54.   Session- is defined as a group of interactions one user takes within a given time frame on your website. Google Analytics defaults that time frame to 30 minutes. Meaning whatever a user does on your website. Ex: browses pages, downloads resources, purchases products before they leave equals one session.

55.   Site link- An ad extension in Google Ad Words that appears below the main ad copy which links to a specific page on the website. In some cases, Google might supplement your site links with descriptions that you've provided about those pages. Either you can add those details yourself when creating or editing site links, or Google can automatically use the information within your account related to individual site links (for example, from various ads in your account). By showing additional information with your site links, your ads can be more relevant to potential customers.

56.   Sitemap- An XML file or page on a website that lists all of the pages and posts for search engines to see.

57.   Source- is a term in Google Analytics that helps webmasters classify where traffic is coming from. That is the “source” of web traffic. The source can be a search engine or a domain.

58.   Title tag- is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a given result and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.

59.   Tracking code- is a small snippet of code that is usually implemented as JavaScript in the HTML source code of a website. These lines of code allow advertisers, webmasters, and marketers to analyze the flow of visitors to websites and the activities of users.

60.   Unique visitor- is a term used in Google analytics to refer to a person who visits a site at least once within the reporting period. Each visitor to the site is only counted once during the reporting period, so if the same IP address accesses the site many times, it still only counts as one visitor.

it took over 2 months to put all this together. Did I miss any digital marketing terms? If so, please do comment and help to add them!