Top 50 Digital Marketing Terms Decoded

This specially consolidated post of simply explained terminology puts the ultimate digital marketing glossary at your fingertips. Work your way down the list to learn new terms, clarify any confusions or test existing knowledge. Abandon hesitation and go straight from dictionary definitions to confident conversations in a jiffy!

• A/B Test: A practice of simultaneously testing multiple variations of a design or feature to eliminate the poor performing ones.
• Above the fold: Banner ads placed at the top of a webpage or an email so that visitors can view them without scrolling.
• Ad rank: A vital Google AdWords feature that combines the bid amount and quality score of ads to determine the ad position.
• Alt text: This is the ‘alternative text’ assigned to an image that appears when the image fails to display or download. If the image is ‘call-to-action’, the text provides relevance even if the image does not appear. Read by web crawlers, this is known to have a positive impact on search engine optimization.
• Analytics: A feature that provides key insights and stats for websites and other applications, especially regarding user interaction, which help devise, monitor, measure and manage product evolution strategies.
• API: Short for ‘Application Programming Interface’, is a set of functions, commands and protocols that programmers use to interact with an operating system.
• Backlinks: Incoming or inbound links to a webpage. High-quality backlinks, such as links from highly credible websites, are great from an SEO perspective.
• Blog: A publicly accessible website that contains an author’s opinions, descriptions of events and/or other material in the form of text, images or video. Blogs are frequently updated and appear in reverse chronological order. Most blogs generally cater to specific topics or interest groups.
• Bookmark: A menu shortcut created by a user to access a particular webpage in the future.
• Browser: A software application or program that locates, retrieves and displays webpages of websites from the web or network and allows users to navigate through them. Popular browsers include Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer among others.
• Call-to-action: A marketing concept that refers to an instruction (in the form of a text, link, image etc.) for leads or visitors to perform an immediate action. A call-to-action is generally displayed as a distinct button with actionable text such as ‘subscribe now’.
• Canonicalization: An SEO process to normalize multiple URLs containing similar content to a single dominant version. This process of reducing duplication has a positive impact on SEO.
• Churn rate: Refers to the measure of customer or employee attrition. It is defined as number of customers who discontinue a service divided by the average total number of customers. In the digital context, this may include email unsubscribes and social media profile unlikes or unfollows.
• Click-through rate (CTR): An important measure of an online ad’s success, it refers to the number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of times the ad is shown. It is expressed as percentage.
• Cost per click (CPC): The actual price you pay for each click in an online ad campaign. Also known as ‘pay-per-click’ or PPC advertising.
• Cost per conversion: The ratio of the number of ad views to the number of successful conversions (signups, purchases etc.) resulting from the ad. Also known as ‘cost-per-acquisition’.
• Cost per thousand impressions (CPM): Refers to paying for an ad based on number of impressions i.e. number of times the ad is shown. As M stands for 1000 in roman numerals, the term is abbreviated as CPM.
• Creative commons: A not-for-profit organization that allows users to share their creative work through easy to use copyright licenses. It works as a standardized way to provide public permission to share and use one’s work under certain conditions of their choice. See creativecommons.org for more information.
• CSS: Short for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’, is a computer language used to write formatting or designing instructions. It plays a huge role in how a webpage appears in terms of layout, width and alignment among others.
• Domain masking: The process of hiding or masking a website’s actual domain with another domain. Masking may prevent visitors from seeing your domain name forwarding by keeping your domain name in the browser’s address bar.
• EBook: An electronic version of a book that can be read on a computer or handheld device.
• Email bounce rate: The percentage of email subscribers that did not receive an email since the message was returned by the recipient’s email server. It is further divided into hard bounce (when mails are sent to an invalid address) and soft bounce (temporary issues with mail server). It is an important metric for analyzing the success of email marketing. Bounces have a negative impact on the sender reputation.
• Email click rate: The number of individuals who click on one or more links on an email and is expressed as a percentage of total opens. It is a vital metric to analyze the recipients’ engagement with the email.
• Email open rate: A measure of the number of people on a subscriber list who open or view a particular email campaign.
• Handle: This refers to the username selected when creating an account on Twitter. Each handle has a unique URL and is used as ‘@handle’.
• Hashtag: An unspaced phrase prefixed with # that is used to classify and categorize content. Pioneered by twitter, this now used extensively across major social networking websites. This is a quick way to identify trending topics among the mammoth content shared socially.
• HTML: HyperText Markup Language is a programing language used to create and visually represent a webpage.
• Impressions: Refers to a measure of the number of times an ad is shown.
• Javascript: A programming language that allows programmers to design webpages with interactive features.
• JQuery: A Javascript library that allows web developers to add extra functionality to their websites. It is open-source and the most popular JavaScript library in use as of today.
• Keyword match types: An important concept in search engine marketing that refers to how closely the keyword needs to match a search query in order to trigger an ad. Depending on requirements, an advertiser may choose among:  broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match or negative match.
• Keyword stuffing: An unethical SEO technique that includes adding excessive number of keywords to the content, HTML and tags of a webpage in order to manipulate a website’s rank on a search engine. This is strictly against the webmaster guidelines and may lead to banning of a website from appearing in search results.
• Landing page: A page on a website that is specifically designed to prompt leads or conversions. This is usually the display page after a call-to-action is clicked.
• Long-tail keywords: These are a combination of 3-6 words that contain both generic and specific terms. For example, while ‘dress’ is a generic keyword, ‘black zara lace dress’ is a long tail keyword. The latter help in better quality traffic and higher conversion rates, and are also less competitive than generic keywords.
• Marketing automation (Saas): Refers to the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, A/B testing, targeting, timing and other key ROI driven practices. Using integration with website content and social media, it provides businesses with key metrics for analysis and helps improve customer experiences.
• Meta description: Also known as meta tag, it is a snippet of HTML code in a web page header that summarizes the content on the webpage. Adding meta tags is a good practice for SEO, even though it is not considered to be a factor that influences Google’s search rank algorithm.
• Negative keywords: A type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain term or phrase. Adding negative keywords can help online advertisers reach the most interested customers, save time, reduce costs and increase ROI.
• Organic results: These are search results on search engines that are naturally or organically generated without any commercial/paid influence. Recommended SEO processes may be used to improve natural rankings of a website. Organic results are earned and not bought.
• Page rank: The result of an undisclosed algorithm used by Google to determine the importance of a webpage relative to the user search query. The number of links leading to a page is one of the many factors that Google takes into account while determining page rank in search results.
• Paid results: As opposed to organic results, these involve paying a fee to search engines for inclusion of their webpages in search results. Also known as sponsored listings.
• Permalink: A permanent link to a specific entry on a blog post. This helps maintaining an access to a particular blog post even after its outdated and not present on the homepage. Permalinks may be customized for SEO purposes.
• Podcast: A digital or audio file that is usually part of a themed series and is available for download directly from a streaming Internet source.
• RSS Feed: Rich Site Summary often dubbed as Really Simple Syndication, it is a simple and effective way to add content to your site. Once added, RSS feed can help a site get automatically updated with headlines and snippets of new content from RSS site sources.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): This is a process of optimizing webpages or whole websites to make them more search engine friendly. Complying with SEO best practices generally leads to better organic results and higher page rank.
• Search terms: Keywords or phrases used to conduct searches on search engines.
• Social media: Platforms for online social interaction, wherein users create, share or exchange content. Leading social media platforms have also become sources of business leads, sales and branding. Examples include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Google Plus among others.
• Unsubscribe: An online service helping users to opt-out of unwanted emails and newsletters from their email accounts.
• URL shortener: These services help squeezing lengthy URLs into small ones that are easier to share and remember. Popular service providers include Google URL Shortener, Bitly and TinyURL.
• UX: User Experience or UX is an essential component of digital media, involving designing a service based on various factors such as user behavior, insight, emotions and experience among others. Interaction, engagement and gamification are important components of UX.
• Viral: Type of marketing that involves spreading information to a large number of users via social media in a short period of time. Most viral media is viewed by more than a million people in less than a week. While content is often pushed by marketers, certain content may become organically viral because of sheer social interest and involvement.

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