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.

That’s all folks! Remember to bookmark this page for a quick lookup using Cmd+D (Mac) or Ctrl+D (PC). To search for specific terms, activate the find shortcut using Cmd+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (PC).

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No More Dud Data: Learn to Interpret Numbers

   
The appropriate time to think about data analysis in not after you’ve obtained a heap of numbers, but before you even begin to collect it. Defining the problem, determining the research design, designing the data-collection tool and deciding the research sample must precede effective data analysis. Proactive thought about the data interpretation sought must be put in before preparing the data-collection tool to ensure that minimum questions yield the maximum result.



Understanding the nature of data is crucial in determining which methods and statistics would be meaningful for your data. Here are the main types:

• Nominal: Represents categories that are mutually exclusive e.g. coding gender where 1 represents male and 2 represents female.
• Ordinal: Represents categories that are rank ordered e.g. school grades where A is exceptional, B is average and C is poor. Differences between categories are not preserved when ordinally scaled.
• Interval: Represents numbers used to rank items such that numerically equal distances on the scale represent equal distances in the property being measured, where the location of the zero point is arbitrary e.g. measures of temperature with the Fahrenheit or Celsius scales.
• Ratio: Represents numbers used to rank items such that numerically equal distances on the scale represent equal distances in the property being measured, where the location of the zero point is fixed.

Before we dive into data analysis techniques, below is a refresher of some common market research terms. Already comfortable with this jargon, hop-skip-jump to the next section.

• Population: The total number of measurements or outcomes that conform to some designated specifications relevant to the study e.g. total students at a university.
• Sample: A representative subset of the population used to infer something about the larger group e.g. 50 randomly selected students at the university. The more the variability within a population, the larger the sample size required for more precise characteristic estimation. Sampling designs may be based on nonprobability samples (convenience, judgment, quota) or probability samples (simple random, stratified, cluster).
• Parameter: Characteristic of a population e.g. population mean.
• Statistic: Characteristic of a sample, which may help predict a population parameter e.g. sample mean may predict population mean.
• Outliers: An observation that is so abnormally different in magnitude from other values in the data that the analyst decides to treat it as a special case and may exclude it from analyses e.g. 1 observation with annual household income greater than $900,000, while the remaining 100 data points range between $50,000 to $100,000. An outlier is not an error.
• Hypothesis test: The test to predict a population parameter by rejecting or accepting statistical hypotheses. May be one-tailed or two-tailed depending on the region of rejection. The test aims to verify assumptions while avoiding Type I (alpha) and Type II (beta) errors.
• Independent variables: The predictor variables that are controlled by the researcher to predict the dependent variable e.g. drug dose and time of drug administration.
• Dependent variable: The variable being predicted, which is affected by the independent variables e.g. impact of drug on illness.
• Control: The group within an experiment that does not receive treatment by the researcher and is used as a benchmark against which test subjects are compared e.g. those who did not receive the drug dose.
• Null hypothesis: The hypothesis that is presumed to be true for purposes of statistical testing against an alternate hypothesis. The null hypothesis is rejected based on statistical evidence from the hypothesis test. Usually, the null refers to no treatment effect or no difference between groups e.g. the drug has no impact on treatment of illness. Denoted by H₀ it will typically include an equal sign.
• Alternate hypothesis: This hypothesis reflects that there will be an observed effect of the treatment in the hypothesis test. If the null hypothesis is rejected, then we accept the alternate hypothesis. Denoted by H_a or H₁ it will typically have an inequality.

Whether it’s just a handful of numbers or a spreadsheet with countless rows and columns, there’s a lot you can do to turn data into useful information. Here’s an overview of some of the most prevalent data analysis methods:

BASIC ANALYSES

• Mean: The average of the data set. It is calculated as the sum of all values divided by the total number of values e.g. average age of a group.
• Median: The value that falls in the middle of the data set when all values are ordered in ascending magnitude. It is equidistant from the smallest and largest values in the set e.g. the fifth value in a set of nine numbers.
• Mode: The value that is repeated most often in a data set. One set may have more than one mode if the frequency of repetition is the same e.g. in the set 8, 9, 9, 11, 11, 14 the modes are 9 and 11.
• Range: The difference between the largest and smallest values in a data set e.g. for a list of random numbers from 10 to 50, the range is 40. The data set should be sorted in magnitude to ensure the largest and smallest values are considered, and not the first and last values.
• Variance: The average of the squared differences from the mean. To calculate, first compute the mean, then subtract the mean from each data value and square the result, and finally work out the average of the squared differences.
• Standard deviation: Measures the amount of variation or dispersion from the average. To calculate, compute the square root of the variance. Represented by the Greek letter sigma.

ADVANCED ANALYSES

• Chi-square test: When understanding differences between groups, chi-square test helps assess the goodness of fit between observed frequencies and those expected theoretically. Typically used when the predictor and outcome are both categorical variables e.g. gender and color preference in apparel.
• t-test: Looks at the difference between two groups on a particular variable of interest, where the independent variables have only two groups. Typically used when the predictor variable is categorical and the outcome is continuous e.g. gender and time spent shopping online.
• ANOVA: Tests the significance of group differences between two or more groups, where the independent variables may be two or more categories. However, the ANOVA (analysis of variance) test only determines whether there is a difference, but does not identify which is different e.g. difference in GMAT scores for different income brackets.
• Correlation: Used to determine the relationship or association between two variables, without distinguishing between independent and dependent variables e.g. price of mobile application and number of downloads.
• Multiple regression: Used to identify the best set of predictor variables among several independent variables and their impact on the one dependent variable e.g. price, quantity and advertising on sales volume. A regression model could also help predict responses to potential changes e.g. impact of price increase by 5%.
• Conjoint analysis: Used to determine the relative preference of different features that make up a product or service e.g. considerations when buying a computer – brand, processor, memory, screen size and price. This helps to understand the tradeoffs made when evaluating several attributes together and possibly identifying opportunities for feature enhancement, modification or withdrawal. 

You never know, maybe the reasons for brand switching, customer dissatisfaction, employee turnover and low productivity are sitting in a data set somewhere on your computer. Start the quest to unravel these messages hidden in those numbers.

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The Perfect Landing Page

A landing page is where a user is directed when they click on an ad or any call-to-action button. They might make a purchase, fill out a form or download something. Clearly, this page should be crisp and attractive apart from being optimized and error-free. No surprises here!

Let’s look at some best practices for landing pages that you can keep in mind while designing a perfect one for your site:

• The landing page should be relevant to the ad or call–to-action since referring source sets certain expectations for the user and any incongruity may lead to dissatisfaction.
• Page content should be easy to comprehend, scroll and scan. An A/B test is a good way to get feedback and make changes before finalizing content. It's handy to add alt-text to images in case they do not load due to website or browser issues. Remember, text can be crawled by search engines so use that to your advantage.
• You want users to browse and fill in landing page forms no matter what device they use. Right? So, create responsive layouts that don’t cause screen turbulence and thoroughly test them before going live.
• If forms are used, these should be congruent with landing page goal. Detailed forms with unreasonably long questions tend to demotivate the user and fail to get desired results.
• If you are aiming to get traffic, leads and conversions from your landing pages, you need to optimize for search engines. So ensure that page titles, URLs and meta descriptions have keywords in them.
• What’s the user’s value proposition? Does your landing page answer this? Call-to-action words such as purchase, request, signup or download should be hard to miss.
• Conversation loop should be complete and functional, for example the users should see a ‘Thank You’ page after completing a desired action and receive an email accordingly for closure or next steps.

We hope this helps in creating effective landing pages that work and strike a chord with your audiences. Happy landings!

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Do's and Don'ts of Email Marketing

In 2014, a McKinsey study states that emails are 40 times more effective in acquiring customers than social media. Start with this essential list of do’s and don’ts to create effective and informative emails that customers engage with rather than those that remain unopened or get junked.

Do’s

• Be relevant: Excellent content with a creative touch promotes interest among readers. Subject lines should be short and relevant.
• Personalize: We love personalized emails, don’t we? Also, being responsive to varied interests and demographics cuts through clutter and creates an immediate connection with the reader.
• Be clear and concise: Try to get all information up there in as little words possible. As Einstein said, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
• Be consistent: Send emails at regular intervals while balancing frequency and freshness of content. Most email service providers allow you to schedule emails at specific days and times.
• Proof read: Check. Double check. Triple check. Ensure all links work and appear perfectly.
• Provide contact details: Don’t lose an opportunity to have them contact you. Consider including your various points of contact such as website, email, social media, blog, phone, physical address and map.
• Honor unsubscribes: Offer people an option to opt-for an alternate form of communication.
• Ensure compatibility: Nearly 45 percent of emails are now opened on mobile devices, so optimize for various devices viz. mobiles and tablets.
• Include call to action: What do you want your customers to do? Enquire? Visit website? Visit store? Buy? Avail an offer? Highlight it in an easy, evident and enticing way. Bright colored buttons with embedded links are the fad.

Don’ts

• Irrelevancy: Low-quality content and subject line mismatch fail to provide the reader with what they’re looking for.
• No proof reading: Incorrect details, spelling errors, broken links, incomplete texts are a huge reason for reader disappointment.
• Text overload: Remember we are sending marketing emails, not writing novels. Respect your reader’s time and you’ll get the response you need.
• Email irregularity: Sending too many emails is intrusive and a can cost you a faithful subscriber. Remember they have that oh so powerful ‘unsubscribe’ option.
• Heavy emails: Don’t we know too much of anything is bad. Well even more so if your email won’t load before the reader loses patience. Use graphics and other heavy elements like salt and pepper, but don’t overdo it to ruin the whole meal.
• No call to action: Failure to let the reader know what they have to do may mean that they ‘do nothing’. You should have a reason to send an email, and once that’s clearly defined, make it as plain as the nose on your face.

That’s all folks. Looks like you’re up to speed on the best practices to pump up those dismal open and click rates. Go on, lead your emails to a grateful inbox not fateful junk.

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