Digital Marketing Jargon Buster

Confused by digital jargon? Don’t worry we’re here to help with this handy digital marketing jargon buster.
Have we missed something you want to know more about? Let us know here and we’ll add it to our list!
A/B TESTING

A technique used to test the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns where traffic is exposed to 2 versions of the same page or campaign and the version with the highest click-through rate is seen as the most effective.

ADWORDS

The software used to manage google ad campaigns.

@TAG:

The @ symbol is used in email, but it is now also being used to tag users in messages on social networking websites. Both Twitter and Facebook use the @ tag.

BLOG

A blog is a section on your website used to write articles relevant to your target audience . It gives added credibility for your business as well as a vehicle to aid SEO.

BLACK/WHITE HAT SEO

White hat SEO refers to optimizing your website as per best practices and guidelines. Black hat SEO is the opposite and while it can produce short term results when discovered your website will be severely penalized.

CLICKS

The number of people who click your advert.

CONTENT

Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action

CONVERSION RATE

A metric used to gauge the success of a campaign designed to generate clicks – the total number of visitors is divided by the number who have clicked giving us the conversion rate.

ECOMMERCE

Selling a product or service where the transaction takes place online

EMAIL MARKETING

Using email to deliver your message to your target market – useful for both new and existing clients.

GEO-TARGETING

The practice of search engines displaying results depends on where you are. For example, if you have a business in Glasgow you may not want enquiries from Edinburgh because you do not service that area.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

A tool used to track metrics on your websites like visitor numbers and the pages they visit.

HASHTAGS (#)

Like the concept of tags, a user can draw attention to certain aspects of a Twitter post. By placing a #symbol before a word (phrases must be joined without spaces) it is highlighted as a tag. Other users will do so, and Twitter can track how many people are talking about something. This has been used to track natural disasters as many people tweet about them.

IMPRESSIONS

The number of people who see your advert.

KEYWORDS

A term or phrase that a user will search for with a search engine.

LANDING PAGE

A page on your website is typically used as a destination page for a paid advert so as the users “lands” on a page specific to your advert rather than your homepage.

LINKS

Refers to third-party websites that contain your website address and therefore a “link” to your website. More links to your website from credible websites increase your SEO rankings.

ORGANIC LISTINGS

These are the results of a web search that have not been paid for. The positions of the results should be organic in that they reflect the popularity/trustworthiness of the website without being influenced by paid advertising.

PPC

Pay Per Click. These are paid adverts which are most commonly seen at the top of the search engine results page but can also be images, animations or videos on other websites.

PENGUIN

Google Penguin is the latest version of its PageRank WebCrawler which improves its spam detection. It is better at detecting cloaking, keyword stuffing and duplicate pages. It is in place to better organic searches.

PAGERANK

The algorithm or WebCrawler that powers Google’s search PageRank indexes all the accessible webpages on the web and ranks them by how many important websites link back to a particular page. The higher the rating, the further up the results page they are than similar websites with lower ranks.

RESPONSIVE WEBSITES

A website that can be viewed on any size screen e.g tablet, desktop or mobile. This is increasingly important given the rise of mobile devices.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the digital marketing technique with the goal of positioning your website at the top of search engine results pages for keywords relevant to your business.

SERPS

The search Engine Results Page is the page that is displayed when you search with a search engine. It will have a list of results relevant to your search, as well as PPC adverts. The goal of SEO is to move a website to the top of the results page of relevant searched terms.

SOCIAL MEDIA 

Websites where people interact like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Depending on your business type these can be a great place to promote your product or service.

SHARING

A feature of social networking sites is that users can share content from your site e.g. blogs or images.

USER EXPERIENCE (UX)

In digital, a ‘good user experience is one that helps somebody accomplish a task in the most efficient, effective and enjoyable way possible. There are many elements that comprise user experience, ranging from the visual design, to the way we interact with the product (website/technology/software) and how we interact with it.