Digital Marketing Terms Explained

Backlinks – Incoming links to a website, i.e. links from a third-party website to your website. The number of backlinks gives an indication of the popularity or importance of a website.

Behavioural Targeting – A technique used by online publishers and advertisers that uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behaviour, such as websites they have visited or searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of visitors to a website who leave the website almost immediately, viewing only one page on their visit.

Call To Action – A way to engage a website visitor to interact with a company. Examples include ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Request a Call.’

Campaign – A series of organised and co-ordinated marketing activities such as email marketing, PPC or SEO.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – The percentage of ad impressions or pageviews that result in clicks through to a landing page.

Cost per Lead (CPL) – The cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an advertising campaign by the number of leads generated.

Google PageRank – Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google.

Image & Alt Tags – The alternative text that the browser displays when the user does not want to or cannot see the pictures present in a web page..

Impressions – The number of times an advert is displayed, but not necessarily clicked on.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) – A measurement that is used to ascertain how well an organisation is performing and progressing towards goals.

Key Phrase / Keyword – A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results.

Landing Page – The first page on which a visitor to your site lands. Any page can be a landing page through natural search; in Pay-Per-Click advertising, visitors can be directed to bespoke pages through the URL used in an advert.

Lead – An intended action on a website, for example submitting an enquiry form or making a phone call.

• Hard Lead – Contact leads such as email, phone call; likely to convert to sales.
• Soft Lead – Non-contact leads such as ‘.pdf download’ or ‘Print Details’; less likely to convert to sales than hard leads.

Stickiness – An indication of how effective the website is at keeping visitors from leaving. Time spent on a website and number of pages viewed per visits are indicators of site stickiness.

Unique User – An individual website visitor, typically identified by IP address plus a further identifier such as user agent, cookie or registration ID. A unique user may make 3 visits to a website over a time period.

VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimisation) – Optimising and distributing video content to support a search engine optimisation strategy.

Link Building – The process of obtaining high quality incoming links (backlinks) to a website to increase and improve traffic volume and search engine rankings.

Meta Tags – A piece of text in the source code of a web page that provides information to a search engine about the contents of the page. Important meta tags for SEO include the page title, description and keywords meta tags.

Natural Search – Listings in search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms as opposed to their being advertisements. Natural Search is also used as a synonym for SEO.

Off-page Optimisation – Tasks carried out outside the website being optimized, in particular the building of backlinks from relevant third-party websites and portals, submissions to third-party directions and content syndication via Web 2.0 channels. Off-site optimization is an ongoing task and it must be kept up if high listings are to be retained.

On-page Optimisation – This refers to any SEO work that is carried out on the website itself, including optimisation of meta tags, alt tags and content. This is primarily a one-time task, although adjustments and refreshing of content

Page Views – A page view or page impression is a request to load a single page of a website. Page views indicate how many times individual pages on your website have been viewed within a given time.

PPC (Pay Per Click) – An online advertising system, such as Google AdWords, where advertisers are not charged on the frequency of the advert being shown, but rather by the number of times the advert is clicked on. Adverts appear alongside natural results in search engine results pages.

Quality Score – A score between 0 -10 assigned by Google to PPC keywords. It is a measure of how relevant keyword, advert or landing page is. The higher the Quality Score, the lower the cost per click (CPC) and the better the ad position.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – The act of improving a website’s visibility on search engine results pages for specific search terms.

SERP – A search engine results page or SERP is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.

Sitemap – A list of all pages on a website, accessible to search engines for indexing and to users for finding information.

SMM (Social Media Marketing) – A form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through participation in various social media networks (MySpace, Facebook), social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit), social media sharing (Flickr, YouTube), review/ratings sites, blogs, forums and news aggregators.

Social Bookmarking – A method in which users of social internet sites store, organise, search and manage sites of interest to share with that online community. Examples include Delicious, Digg and Reddit.

Visit – A visit begins when a visitor enters a site with an entry click and views a succession of one or more pages. The end of a visit is signalled by an exit click or a period of inactivity. A unique users can visit a website several times over a time period.